Distributed mobile application for crop farmers

In a recent research collaboration with the College of Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, we investigate the best ways that mobile devices can aid in applying pesticides. Farmers require different pesticides for different crops and at every stage in the development cycle of the crops. Our work presents MobiCrop, which is a mobile app that is deployed to aid farmers with timely decision making on the application of pesticides (i.e., which pesticide to apply, when, where, and how to apply them). MobiCrop is not a standalone mobile app but, a three-tier distributed application with a cloud-hosted backend middleware and a web server. This is to ensure consistent state of services in a single update to the many geographically dispersed mobile users (farmers). The deployment of the middleware layer is to aid mobile updates synchronization in an optimal time based on policies. We further implement a caching technique on the mobile device in order to facilitate seamless access to the data in situations where there is no connectivity. The work also details the preliminary results of the evaluation of MobiCrop which is promising.