Exploring awareness and utilization of agricultural mobile apps among smallholder farmers

Abstract

Low productivity is caused by a number of factors, including high labor costs, unpredictable crop production, and a lack of knowledge about new technologies usage, and methods. The agriculture industry had undergone a change because of agri apps made to help farmers by providing weather data, crop market trends, pest and disease damage identification, guidance on pesticide and fertilizer use, familiarity with the different government initiatives to make better decisions on the management of agricultural fields, ongoing scientific changes in production systems, and taking advantage of market opportunities. A study was conducted to find out the awareness and utilization of agri apps for crop production among farmers in the Hisar district of Haryana state. From the Hisar district, 4 villages, and from each village 30 farmers were selected, randomly. The study revealed that only 30.51 percent of farmers of Hisar district were found aware about the usage of mobile apps while only 16.30 percent actually utilized mobile apps for agriculture purposes, which was found quite low and among which WhatsApp and e-Mausam were used by the majority of farmers. As a result, there are agri apps that have the potential to be utilized in farming and related tasks, but their utilization is currently limited. Agri apps and refined technologies should be developed as user-friendly as feasible in order to maintain farmers' intent to utilize an app eagerly, and promotional techniques should be tailored to target certain qualities of intended users for healthy and remarkable production.