Field and Weather Monitoring with Youths as Sensors for Agricultural Decision Support

Abstract

In Vietnam, proper and continual agricultural engineering guidance for local farmers is required to improve rice cultivation and conserve environment, yet there are issues in the low literacy rate of adults and information dissemination. In order to resolve the issues, the YMC-Viet project, based on the Youth Mediated Communication (YMC) model in which youths mediate communication between local farmers and agricultural experts in remote locations, was proposed. It is inadequate only to unilaterally extract problems from farmers and provide guidance. Advice can be further optimized by providing local quantitative data to agricultural experts. Accordingly, information collection to accurately comprehend local environmental conditions and the rice growth situation is indispensable. However, there is no weather station in the target area and environmental information is severely lacking. In addition, the number of agricultural experts in the area is extremely low and gaining an understanding of the field situation is almost impossible. In this research, therefore, we devised a method to regularly collect environmental and field situation information, by having youths working as weather and field sensors, and utilizing the collected data for agricultural decisions supported by agricultural experts in remote locations, and its efficacy was verified. Then, we created a cultivation knowledge resource and applied it as a contrivance for youths to adequately inform agricultural experts about field growth situations based on collected information. As a result of the experiment, it was revealed that youths met more than 85 percent of the requirements of temperature and humidity measurement and weather observation. Additionally, the data collected and the records showed higher potential by agricultural experts for utilizing the data in agricultural decision support. Moreover, it was confirmed that sometimes youths functioned as disorder and defect detectors. Thus, the efficacy of youths as sensors in terms of collecting information for agricultural support was verified.