New apps be­ing de­vel­oped at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), St Au­gus­tine will al­low farm­ers to make more use of tech­nol­o­gy in their day-to-day farm­ing prac­tices.The apps were de­vel­oped by stu­dents in UWI's De­part­ment of Com­put­ing and In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy as part of AgriNeTT project, a col­lab­o­ra­tive ef­fort be­tween the de­part­ment, UWI's Fac­ul­ty of Food and Agri­cul­ture, and farm­ers' rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

They were launched lo­cal­ly dur­ing the Na­tion­al Agri­cul­ture Mar­ket­ing De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny's (Namde­v­co) World Food Day cel­e­bra­tions at the Nor­ris De­onar­ine Whole­sale Mar­ket, Ma­coya.

Kyle De Fri­etas, who de­vel­oped an app, called Agri­Ex­penseTT along with Ste­fan Boodoo and Jherez Tay­lor, said it was now avail­able for down­load at the Google Play Store and al­lowed farm­ers to track ex­pens­es of more than one crop at a time, track pur­chas­es of agri­cul­tur­al prod­ucts they used on their farms, as well as how much of the prod­ucts pur­chased were ac­tu­al­ly used for each crop.

Prakash Rag­bir, Namde­v­co's ICT man­ag­er, said one of the biggest chal­lenge for farm­ers is keep­ing records and some­times they could on­ly come up with an es­ti­mate which put them at a dis­ad­van­tage eco­nom­i­cal­ly. Rag­bir said the app could al­so gen­er­ate spread­sheets and the da­ta was stored on a cloud serv­er. If a farmer los­es his mo­bile de­vice the da­ta can be down­loaded from the serv­er.

Rag­bir said an­oth­er app was be­ing de­vel­oped to link buy­ers and sell­ers, al­low­ing both par­ties to net­work and take pro­duce di­rect­ly to the buy­er. He said it al­lows farm­ers to move large vol­umes of goods in a short time and in­creas­es prof­its, as well as al­low­ing more time for agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion.Table­land farmer Navin Ram­roop said he was elat­ed about the soft­ware which should elim­i­nate about 60 per cent of the bu­reau­cra­cy in­volved in buy­ing and sell­ing. He said the app would al­so al­low grow­ers with frag­ile pro­duce to get faster ac­cess to buy­ers.The apps were demon­strat­ed at the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed Caribbean Week of Agri­cul­ture (CWA) in Para­mari­bo, Suri­name.

AgriNeTT's project leader/co-or­di­na­tor, Dr Mar­garet Bernard, said "the main fo­cus...is de­vel­op­ing in­tel­li­gent sys­tems with­in agri­cul­ture. There is a lack of da­ta (and) many of the mod­els be­ing built did not have re­al da­ta from the field.""A big part of the AgriNeTT project is the de­vel­op­ment of an Open Da­ta repos­i­to­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly to house agri­cul­ture da­ta on a na­tion­al lev­el. The repos­i­to­ry will house dif­fer­ent da­ta sets, in­clud­ing farm lev­el pro­duc­tion da­ta, com­mod­i­ty prices and vol­umes, farm land spa­tial da­ta, soils, weath­er, and pest and dis­eases track­ing da­ta."

Dr Bernard said the aim of the Open Da­ta repos­i­to­ry was to build a plat­form that would be ac­ces­si­ble through­out the Caribbean. The project seeks to en­cour­age all in the Caribbean farm­ing com­mu­ni­ty to share in up­load­ing da­ta so that "de­vel­op­er teams can use that da­ta cre­ative­ly and build apps (for agri­cul­ture)."She added that the cre­ation of apps and tools based on the da­ta would help to mod­ernise Caribbean agri­cul­ture. "The col­lec­tion, ag­gre­ga­tion, analy­sis, vi­su­al­i­sa­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of da­ta are key to Caribbean com­pet­i­tive­ness," Dr Bernard said.