A framework of information technology-based agriculture information dissemination system to improve crop productivity Author : P. Krishna Reddy and R. Ankaiah

The Indian farming community is facing a multitude of problems to maximize crop productivity. In spite
of successful research on new agricultural practices concerning crop cultivation, majority of the
farmers are not getting upper-bound yield due to several reasons. One of them is that expert/scientific
advice regarding crop cultivation is not reaching the farming community in a timely manner. It is true
that India possesses valuable agricultural knowledge and expertise. However, a wide information
gap exists between research and practice. Indian farmers need timely expert advice to make them
more productive and competitive. In this article, we have made an effort to present a solution to
bridge the information gap by exploiting advances in information technology. We propose the frame-
work for a cost-effective agricultural information dissemination system (AgrIDS), to disseminate
expert agricultural knowledge to the farming community in order to improve crop productivity.
AgrIDS is a scalable system which can be incrementally developed and extended to cover all the
farmers (crops) of India in a cost-effective manner. It enables the farmer to cultivate a crop with
expertise, as that of an agricultural expert, by disseminating both crop and location-specific expert
advice in a personalized and timely manner. With AgrIDS, the lag period between research efforts
and practice can be reduced significantly. Finally, the proposed system assumes great importance due
to the trend of globalization, as it aims to provide expert advice which is crucial to the Indian
farmer to harvest different kinds of crop varieties based on the demand in the world market.