Software & Systems

Cocoa (Theobroma Cacao L.) is the most important cash crop in Ghana today, contributed about 4,5 % of the country’s total GDP in 2011. The country currently produces over a million tonnes of cocoa bean a year that puts it in second place among the world producers of the crop as shown in table 1. This makes issues related to cocoa production very critical in the country.

World top cocoa producing countries

Pests and diseases management is one of the most crucial areas of cocoa farming and agriculture in Ghana as a whole. This is because it affects not only the quantity of yield but also greatly affects the quality of the beans as well as the finished products, such as the taste of chocolate. As a result, the government of Ghana has put in place the National Plant Protection Policy (NPPP) to achieve an efficient system that ensures that minimizes crop losses caused by biological, environmental and ecological factors [1]. Cocoa is affected by a range of pests and diseases, with some estimates putting losses as high as 30% to 40% of global production. Cocoa pest and disease management include management of pest and diseases of cocoa plants as well as pests that attack the beans in storage.

In developing countries such as Ghana, there is a problem of inadequate agricultural workers, that had compelled the few staff available to be thinly distributed across the country. It is not uncommon to have one extension officer being responsible for four dozen villages, even though agriculture is the main occupation of rural dwellers in the country. This makes it extremely difficult to work effectively using current tools under their disposal. It leads to poor documentation and reporting of events, which is crucial for control and management of pest and diseases.

Electronic Agriculture (E-Agriculture)

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) has been applied in numerous fields of endeavors and its potential in agriculture is endless. ICTs have considerable potential to help even small-scale producers prevent losses after investments have been made by identifying and controlling pests and diseases, receiving timely weather information, and improving the use resources [2]. This brought about the concept of e-agriculture.

E-agriculture is usually described as the use of ICTs to improve the management of agricultural information processes and enhance sustainable agricultural development and food security. The main obstacle to implement farmer-based e-agriculture in Ghana is that most of the farmers in rural Ghana have very little or no formal education and therefore cannot read or write. As a result, any of such initiatives would have to be centered on the veterinary and extension officers who work directly with these farmers on a daily basis. As such, this paper seeks to create a system to enhance the work of such officers in the cocoa industry.

The Proposed Web-based System

The cocoa disease and pest management system was developed using ArcGIS from Esri. ArcGIS is an application suite used for creating and managing maps and geographic information in a database as well as analyzing mapped information, compiling and using geographic data.

It is a web-based geographic information system (GIS) that will allow agricultural workers such as extension officers to report pest and diseases encountered on cocoa farms and storage depots in their various stations via preformatted text messages and e-mails directly into a central disease and pest geodatabase. Geodatabase administrators will now be required to scrutinize the posts before publishing this data on the web-based interactive map for using by the various stakeholders as shown on figure 1.

Regulatory Framework on pests and diseases control includes the guidelines of reporting the occurrence of events under the Ministry of Food and Agriculture as well as those affecting the discloser of information to the general public under the laws of the country. The relevant laws governing environmental pollution, plant protection, diseases, pest and pesticide management and control include Environmental Protection Agency Act, 1994, Act 490; Environmental Assessment Regulations, 1999, LI 1652 and its Amendment; Plants and Fertilizer Act, 2010, Act 803; and Food and Drugs Act 1992, PNDCL 3058.

Reports from the field are the preformatted short messages and emails the extension officers sent to the control center using PDAs and smart phone with preinstalled reporting software. These reports go straight into a database at the center, where an administrator will be alerted in real time to verify and publish accordingly.

Reports to stakeholders – are the output information of the system and can include tabulated data, graph for interpretation and geographic information. Geographic information is published on the internet as an interactive map that displays the various districts and pest and disease found on farms in each district including the latitudinal and longitudinal information. Also, a stakeholder can request for a report of any complexity from the control center.

Veterinary and extension officers are the staff of the Ministry of food and agriculture who are responsible for the implementation of government initiatives at the grassroots level by working directly with farmers. They will provide the data for the system by using GSM enabled smartphones and PDA to report the occurrence of pest and diseases to the control center in the form of SMS and emails.

Control center staff are staff of the Plant Protection and Regulation Services Directorate (PPRSD), which is the Technical Directorate of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. The PPRSD is mandated to organize, regulate, implement and coordinate the plant protection services (including pests management and pesticide use) needed for the country in support of sustainable growth and development of agriculture. They will have to scrutinize each report from the fields before publishing. Technical staff will include a pest and disease experts, systems and geodatabase administrator as well as other support staff.

Stakeholders are ministries, departments and agencies both governmental and non-governmental, who will use the output information. The technical structure of the system is shown on figure 2 below.

The Geodatabase Model

Geodatabase is a data container used to store and manage a collection of geographic datasets using a database management system (DBMS) or file system. It is a combination of two terms: geo – which takes care of spatial data (data with longitudinal and latitudinal information attached); and database – repository of data about the entities themselves. The proposed system runs on the multiuser ArcSDE Geodatabase with SQL Server DBMS storage model. ArcSDE Geodata­base is a collection of various types of GIS datasets held as tables in a relational database, which allows the geodatabase to be edited and used simultaneously by many users of the system. Figure 3 shows the entity relationship diagram of the geodatabase.

The geodatabase runs behind the interactive map providing the spatial data needed for analysis and also receiving and storing the data from the field. Also, the screenshots of the interface in the GIS system in use are shown below in Figure 4 and 5.

Conclusion

GIS has become a new phase of web evolution that uses the web as a platform for creating new kinds of content rich and user friendly applications. ArcGIS offers a user friendly mapping technology for representing geographic information such as the one proposed in this paper.

A Web-based information system was developed to help automate the control and management of pest and disease of cocoa using geographical information technology. The system yet to be piloted in selected District in the Western region of Ghana will aid agricultural extension and experts to efficiently and effectively communicate and inform each other as well as the appropriate government ministries, departments and agencies of the various disease they encounter at their stations. This will help the government to manage and take the necessary precautionary measures in times of outbreaks across stations.

The system can also be used to manage annual mass spraying and fertilizer applications usually organized and managed by the government.

Even though the system was developed with cocoa as a case study crop, it can be applied in managing pest and disease in other plant and animal production.

References

1.     Pest Management Plan. Draft final report, SAL Consult Limited, MOFA, 2011.

2.     Pehu E., Belden C., Majumdar S., ICT in agriculture: Module 5 – increasing crop, livestock, and fishery productivity through ICT, The World Bank report number 64605, 2011.

3.     Kroschewski K., Kramer M., Micklich A., Staubach C., Carmanns R., Conraths F.J., Animal disease outbreak control: the use of crisis management tools, Rev. sci. tech. Off. int. Epiz., 2006, no. 25 (1), pp. 211–221.

4.     Xin J., Hu P., Journ. of Inform. Technology in Agriculture, Vol. 3, pp. 37–45.

5.     Shustikov D.A., Diss. kand. tekh. nauk [Ph.D. Thesis], Tver, Tver State Technical Univ., 2011.