Supportive System for Virtual Farming using Mobile Computing

India is predominantly an agrarian economy. The agricultural industry despite its predominance, is plagued with myriad issues leading to serious consequences. This is a pressing matter, and a multitude of reasons exist for farmers' problems but the primary causes include failure of crops and extreme debt. Apart from the natural factors affecting agriculture, the main challenges faced by a farmer lie in the financial and marketing aspects. The paper aims to develop an application that would serve as a support system to overcome the above problems. The system proposes that the farmers' lease their land to a client for a certain period. During this period, the farmer lets the client take on all the monetary necessities associated with the land. The condition is that the land can only be utilized for harvesting crops and maintenance activities but no other responsibilities like marketing, financing, crop failures, etc. This enables the client to implement his learning and knowledge on agriculture in a realworld, marketing of the yield real-time setup. The farmer is guaranteed a minimum return upon acceptance of the contract and would get to learn new farming techniques from the client without any financial burden. A bidding system is in place for the clients to compete for a farm of their choice. Upon placing a bid, the farmer can view and select the client of their choice and vice versa, in order to go into a mutual agreement. In this way, the contract is established between the two parties. This would serve as an intuitive way to tackle the problem that has been deep-rooted in the farmer's minds and lead them towards the path of progress. Complete transaction model between the farmers and client can be handled using a mobile computing platform using text, image, audio and video along with advisory links for both the parties. A prototype model is created using the android platform based on the above concepts.