Agriculture is the most important economic activity in Africa continent. But since the lack of accessibility to innovative technology, the industry has suffered from blind-out direction of farming management, even though the continent is under a harsh and massive amount of difficulties of weather changing and lack of financial support. Therefore, many developers had seized the opportunity of bringing technology to African farmers, especially Data Science. Here are the aspects that how Data Science can really beneficial for farm management in Africa:
1. Crop Performance Management
From Crop Yield Prediction to Crop Density Prediction, data science can help African farmers understand more about their on-time crop performance to map up appropriate solution plans. Based on the data from the community system, the metrics that are needed to measure the crop performance will be taken into consideration to let the farmers know the past, current, and potential status of their crops to keep track of their life cycles. This feature will be specifically useful for African farmers since many external and internal factors can tremendously affect the crops’ health at any stage of their growth from the continent harsh environmental conditions.
2. Weather Forecast
Agriculture is dependent a lot on weather, since the crops can be affected by different weather conditions, such as excessively drought, heavily humidity or unusual patterns of temperatures. Moreover, weather is the only factor regarding farming that people cannot intefere or control; the only solution is to have better preparation to lean into it for the best result for the crops. With the data science technology, forecasting weather is a huge beneficial feature for sensitive crops such as cashew, coffee, and banana.
3. Treatment Recommendation
Plant crops require a strict and scientific “menu” for their growth life to finally yield successfully, so the farmers should not neglect their plants’ treatment and feeding process. With the help of data science and machine learning, plant crops need nutrition, and how to supply the treatment to them will be automatically recommended based on past and updated data all-in-one. This feature would help the farmers not go blind in taking care of their crops, reducing the risk of sudden failing factors.
4. Automatic Irrigation System
The weather is a very unpredictable factor regarding farm management, so planning the amount of water to supply for the harvested crops would be a challenge if the drought/rainy weather is not constant. Therefore, an automatic irrigation system would be helpful for the farmers: gather weather condition information in a period, and decide the water supply base on the collected data. There would be no more blindly watering timing and wrong amount of water decisions.
CONCLUSION
Technology will be further developed in the upcoming future with more beneficial features. Farming management step-by-step would no longer be a game of luck but rather a game of evaluation and appropriate implementation thanks to technology innovation. We will come closer to closing the gap of risk, enhancing the chance of success into the highest rate for farming strategy.
