ICT solution architecture for agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture is an important sector with the majority of the rural population in developing countries depending on it. The agricultural sector is confronted with the major challenge of increasing agriculture production to feed a growing and increasingly prosperous population in a situation of decreasing availability of natural resources. Factors of particular concern are water shortages, declining soil fertility, effects of climate change and rapid decrease of fertile agricultural lands due to urbanisation. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) in agriculture have the potential to increase the efficiency, productivity and sustainability agriculture by providing information and knowledge sharing. In this paper, we seek to illustrate the contribution of ICT to food security and sustainability agriculture in developing countries. We argue that developing solution architecture (e-agriculture framework) to expose farmers to the much needed agricultural information (i.e., preharvest and post harvest information, pricing, weather conditions etc) can boost agricultural productivity. We show that such a framework must accommodate the dynamic trends in ICT tools, applications, adoption and usage. Further, we illustrate the development of such a framework to address these aforementioned properties to improve agricultural productivity.