Smart Krishi: An app about Agriculture in your fingertips

With the development of scientific techniques and methods leading to overall development in professional agriculture, the field has recently started being digitalized too. That doesn’t mean that people have starting growing fruits on smartphones though, it means that the vital information, which play a great role for changing the conventional methods of farming in Nepal, are being available on digital media. Development of Agriculture related apps is one of them, and here we are going to discuss about ‘Smart Krishi’, which is currently available for Android devices.

Smart Krishi, developed by Sudip Singh and Anil Regmi, has a lot of categories to choose from (which is what makes it a source of diverse information). In the top, you can see the ‘professional agriculture’, where you will see the information regarding on vegetables and fruits farming, along with animal husbandry. Inside these options, you can see the details of species related, which included introduction, climate and soil required, importance in daily lives, ways to take care of, protection methods and many more. These seem to be excellent for the newcomers in the farming business, one doesn’t even require technicians when they use this app. But the data is really limited, when I launched this app, all I could see was only one species in each category, let’s hope the developer will update more data in near future.

The ‘market value’ followed the top, which included the current prices of different agricultural items, which are available for sale in Kathmandu, such as vegetables, fruits, pulses, meat items and grains. The success stories and news is on the third, where you can read about the people who became successful by different farming techniques, as well as different news related to the same. Below this, in the ‘library’ section, you can read about various things such as diseases control, modern machinery equipment necessary for farming, earthworm fertilizer, or even the ways related to human health, such as to control pain while on periods, or benefits of drinking water stored on a copper vessel.

There is also a section for ‘trade’, where the information regarding the sale or required agricultural items is found. Below this, in the ‘organizations for help’, you can see the details of several organizations, such as the district offices of agriculture development or livestock services, and several others is kept. You will see the list of ‘Agrovates’ beneath this, and information about trainings or jobs when you go down further. At the bottom, there is ‘farmer’s community’ which says it is still in the process of development.

The app uses Devnagari script, or simply Nepali font everywhere (which makes the details easier to read for the farmers), so may not be visible for the Android devices running on version 4.0 or below. Which means, if you are using an android device running on Gingerbread, there is not any benefit for you to use this app.

Verdict

The app in overall is an excellent utility app, especially for established or growing farmers. The data needs to be decentralized, information outside Kathmandu should also be kept, as the targeted users of this app, which are professional farmers are mainly located outside valley. The ‘auto-update’ would be useful, as the price in the market fluctuates daily. Along with this, there is no need to mention that the data, especially for the ‘professional farming’ needs to be increased, may be the developers are working on it!

Download

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sudip.smartkrishi

iOS: Not Available