A generic mobile agriculture architecture: a case study of dairy farming

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Information TechnologyThe high penetration of mobile phones in the Kenyan market has given lead to the opportunity to use mobile devices for economic activities such as agriculture. With Kenya geared towards the accomplishment of Vision 2030, agriculture has been identified as one of the supporting component of the social and economic pillars of Vision 2030. This means that the success of agriculture in Kenya will accelerate the realization of Vision 2030. One of the key agricultural sectors in Kenya is dairy farming . Even though this sector contributes highly to the country's GDP, it is faced by immense challenges including poor market information, lack of collaboration platforms for the various stakeholders, lack of easy access of information and manual processes in produce data collection and access. The aim of this paper was to determine the extent of usage of M-Agriculture applications in Kenya, to determine the design requirements for an M-Agriculture architecture and to propose an M-Agriculture architecture. The paper also highlighted on the development of an M-Agriculture application suite. The findings of the study suggest that there are present implementations of mobile agriculture in developed countries while developing countries like Kenya have only a few cases . However, the study established that the usage of m-agriculture applications has great potential in enhancing business processes among various stakeholders of the dairy industry. The result of the study is the design and implementation of a mobile agriculture architecture that is applicable in dairy farming. This research provides a comprehensive approach on how to develop systems using mobile technology that integrate with existing systems. Future researchers can use this architecture as a starting point in developing mobile agriculture frameworks and models , while system developers in the area of mobile agriculture can be able to use this architecture to develop mobile systems in agriculture