Social Life Network for Disease and Pest Control

Abstract

The agriculture sector in Sri Lanka faces various issues such as overproduction, under supply, pest and disease outbreaks which has affected the farming community. Controlling diseases and pests related to cultivation is one of the major issues that farmers face during their farming activities. The current process of detecting and controlling pests and diseases is very time consuming in terms of collecting, analyzing, processing pest and disease related data and notifying outbreaks to the relevant parties. This limits the timely and proactive actions that could have been taken to control those pests and diseases. To address the drawbacks and limitations in the current process, our proposed solution has built a Social Life Network to help control the spread of diseases and pests. Building a Social Life Network provides a good mechanism to link all the stakeholders of the agriculture sector. It also facilitates the integration of information, knowledge and resources which are scattered in different places and provide instant access to real time, dynamic information through the Social Life Network. Thereby improving the information visibility to its stakeholders and providing the ability to make accurate and timely decisions. With this system, details of crop pests or diseases (images with GIS data, spatial data) are obtained from farmers together with the spatiotemporal data with minimum delay would be available for analysis by the relevant officers to detect possible disease or pest. The spread of verified diseases or pests is alerted via a map showing the locations as hotspots. A model would be formulated to predict the spread of diseases or pests based on past data collected. Evaluation of the prototype was done with the main stakeholders including 24 farmers, 12 AIs from the Kalutara District and 2 pesticides suppliers (one from a large scale organization and another from a small and medium scale organization). Evaluation of the prototype system suggested that there was a lot of positive feedback towards the system. Further enhancements captured from the feedback and usability improvements of the user interfaces can be utilized to make this system a nationwide success.