Krushi Advisor

“Krushi Advisor” is an agricultural advisory services in Sri Lanka.

The dynamic growth of mobile communications technology is creating opportunities for economic growth, social empowerment, and grass root innovations in developing countries. One of the areas with the greatest potential impact is in the contribution that mobile applications can make to agricultural and rural development, by providing access to information, markets, and services to millions of rural inhabitants. Mobile apps are software designed to take advantage of mobile technology and can be developed for technology besides mobile phones. But mobile phones have many key advantages: affordability, wide ownership, voice communications and instant and convenient service delivery. The term “mobile agricultural apps” is used to characterize any mobile app targeting to the needs of the agricultural sector and its stakeholders specifically, offer various kinds of services including agricultural advisory services.

“Krushi Advisor” is an Android version agriculture mobile app providing agricultural advisory services for food crop cultivation in Sri Lanka. The target group of this mobile app considers farmers, agriculture entrepreneurs, students and other agriculture information seeking stakeholders. This covers all the food crop information in detailed advisory manner such as suitable location, available varieties with seed and planting material requirement, field establishment with nursery management, fertilizer recommendation, water management, weed management, pest management, disease management, nutrient deficiency and physical disorders, harvesting and post harvesting and special crop management systems available for selected food crop by user. The significant facility of this app is the ability to contact 1920 agricultural advisory service at any time by user through different communication methods including voice call (TP: 1920 short code), data call (TP: 0702201920 - Whatsapp, Viber, Imo and Skype), multimedia message with text, picture, voice and video and email facility when clarification, further information or any other advisory is needed. Apart from food crop information, this app covers other relevant subjects which are immensely useful to the stakeholders such as latest agricultural technology, acts and regulations and agriculture related service providers with their contact details. “Krushi Advisor” is an offline mobile app which can be used when there is limited access to internet connectivity such as most remote farming locations in Sri Lanka as reference data to run the app is stored locally on the device. However, this requires downloading of all reference data during installation and then later connects with the back-end to synchronize the updates. The efficiency of this mobile app as a tool for agricultural advisory service can be evaluated by the number of downloads or users within a given time and further modifications and updates should be carried out when necessary is compulsory.