Mobile phone controlled farm management aider

Agricultural sector feeds the world population and yet this sector has been provided with least of the technological support for its advancement especially in India. One of the key challenges that a rural Indian farmer faces is the lack of proper monitoring and control mechanisms for efficient operation. Despite advent of mobile telephony is large scale across rural India, this technology is not tapped into for their core occupational needs in agriculture. This paper is a field based study to develop a prototype for heeding to this problem of a rural Indian farmer. Detailed interviews were conducted with farmers from two villages in Palakkad and Kottayam districts of Kerala to understand their specific concerns and needs in terms of the monitoring and control in their farms. The cost-effective prototype developed consists of a combination of Raspberry pi unit along with GSM module and a combination of sensors.