Abstract:
Most of the Sri Lankan farmers are used to cultivate any selected crop traditionally, as
they are taught to be from their farming society. Due to this reason, there will be an
overproduction from the same crop within a particular season. Even several crop
forecasting applications are available in Sri Lanka, lack of reliability is the main
drawback of these applications. These applications fail to guide the farmers to get a
detailed review due to the interfaces of these applications are unable to visualize the
required data reliably. In this research, a “Govi Nena” mobile-based application and a
web-based dashboard were developed to select the most accurate crops to be cultivated to
get the highest market demand and yield in an instant and reliable way with the userfriendly interfaces. Farmers have to enter the data about the conditions of their land, soil
types according to their agro-ecological zone to the mobile application when they register
to the application. The mobile application links with crop knowledgebase and provides
crop lists of what they need to cultivate and crop calendar for each crop based on the
planting dates inserted by the farmers. The analysed information based on the farmer
inputs through a mobile application will be visualized on the dashboard, which consists of
multifunctional, proper, understandable, and user-friendly interfaces including tables,
charts, and graphs. When a farmer uses this dashboard, he/she can get a clear
understanding of; how the yield of each crop varies with the time, most compatible crops
which have been cultivated in different areas, how the market price for the crops varies
with the time, etc. The dashboard shows the relationships, comparisons, composition, and
distributions of the information/knowledge. Farmers can get a clear picture through
understandable visualizations via this dashboard for selected crops.
Keywords: Web-based dashboard, Mobile-based application, Sri Lankan agriculture,
famers
