Design And Implementation Of Farming Skills Dissemination System

For ages, agriculture in particular crop production has been holding vital place in the livelihood and economy of the countries including Rwanda. The Rwandan economy is based mainly on agriculture. In fact the sector occupies91.1%of the active population, especially women. It contributes to36%to GDP besides contributing to about70%of the country’s export revenue. However, agriculture in Rwanda is still practiced in old fashioned manner. It is observed that a lot of human efforts and time is used in crop production but little yield is obtained due to reasons bellow.The lack of knowledge, lack of access to knowledge about crops that should be grown and what are techniques that should be applied to grow such crop to ensure that, it will grow in a more productive way.As a crop grows it goes through different phases over the growth cycle process, each phase that crop goes through possesses balanced soil requirements which signifies how much content each of element of the soil nutrients has to be contained in order to yield highly in both quality and quantity. There is a shortage and/or inaccessibility to such details by the farmers.In addition to the above statement, the knowledge of a given crop with all the phases it goes through during the growth cycle leads to knowledge of pest effects and the pests’ treatments. Pest that affect crops are different and each pest has its targeted phase, hence as long as that phase comes in, then the pests targeting it comes to damage. Once the pest is known and identified then the treatment can be known and provided hence treat such pest(s). The shortage and/or inaccessibility to the pest effects and the matching treatments shall always leave pest damage uncontrolled hence less or no yield at all.The Information and Communication Technology holds the advantage in collecting data, manipulating them and make useful information, centralize the information and make them available remotely with high accuracy, on less price, and in less time (considered in few seconds or few minutes). Therefore agriculture can be more productive if the farming skills and related knowledge are available using the current Information and Communication Technology infrastructure in place. In a more precise way, this computer based solution shall get agriculture expert to supply farming skills and related knowledge. On the other side, farmers shall access and make practical use of the provided information in their farms.The details of this work shall be tackled in seven main parts; the first part is the introduction of the project which explains what the projects works out(Chapter1). The second part covers the system requirements, which are the functional requirements that describe what the system performs and non-functional requirements which are the criteria used to judge the operation of the system (Chapter2). The third part covers Object Oriented Analysis (OOA) which focuses on understanding the domain (Chapter3). The fourth part covers Object Oriented Design (OOD) which covers the details of the requirements (Chapter4, Chapter5). The fifth part covers the implementation of the system; the design is mapped to codes (Chapter6). The sixth part cover the demonstration, this contains the user interfaces that the user shall be interacting with in order to execute system’s operations (Chapter7). Finally, the last part talks of the conclusion and the future work (Chapter8).