Development of an Android Based Mobile Application for the Production and Management of Organic Manure (MoAPOM)

Small and medium scale farmers are faced with the challenge of insufficient information on organic farming practices especially in the production of manures. Extension officers can't visit all remote locations and the places visited cannot receive timely assistance or response to enquiries. This study aims to develop an Android based mobile application for the production and management of organic manures (MoAPOM). MoAPOM is targeted for use by small and medium scale farmers that are interested in sustainable and improved crop production. MoAPOM was designed as an Intelligent Computer-Aided Instruction (ICAI) based system and the traditional methods of organic manure production using Human-to-Human (H2H) communication was converted into Machine-to-Human (M2H) communication. Five types of organic manure production were identified and modelled, namely: kitchen waste, cattle dung, poultry waste, green manure and earthworm compost. After implementation, MoAPOM was validated successfully for offline usage, multiple tutorial, timeliness, ease of download, sharing portability and convenient GUI. Future research may consider implementing MoAPOM on other platforms like iOS and windows mobile operating systems. Also, soft computing approaches should be considered for mining individual soil properties for recommending manure types.