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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Overview of the Current State of Technology

According to the International Rice Research Institute, in the year 1960, rice

research played a major role in addressing the challenge of increasing food production. It

lead to the improvement of rice potential through shortened growth duration and faster

response to irrigation and nutrients. It resulted to a phenomenon called green revolution,

which produced rice to feed at least 600 million more people at affordable prices.

In the Philippine setting, agriculture plays a significant role in the economy as it contributes to the

employment 40% of Philippine labor workforce and 20% to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

According to the comparative graph from Trading Economics (2018), it was seen that at the end

of fiscal year 2016, the GDP derived from agriculture amounted to roughly Php 180,000 Million.

This trend is so because rice is considered as the main agricultural crop in the

Philippines; however, despite the fact that the country is one of the world's biggest rice

importers and has the most of the farmers employed, still the Philippines remain at

poverty level, more importantly so are the rice farmer.

(https://tradingeconomics.com/philippines/gdp-from-agriculture)

In an article published by Cayabyab (2012) entitled ” Why Philippines lags

behind neighbors in agriculture, land reform”, the news mentioned that there was a time

when Thailand was very behind the Philippines to the innate resourcefulness of the

Filipinos to produce more output but with less input. However this is not the case today.

Thailand is way beyond the Philippines and so with other Asian countries.
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Looking deeper, it was found out that other Asian neighbours had strong handling

of farming technology. According to Perehudoff (2007), as for the case of Thailand, farm

tractors and irrigation technology substituted the usage of cows and that training in

farming villages have took place. The studies conducted the International Rice Research

Institute (IRRI) has been disseminated and farmers took advantage of it through the new

rice varieties, strains, fertilizers and other technologies. In contrast, rice farming and its

processes in the Philippines has very minimal application of technologies that may make

it more efficient.

In an article published by Farm Industry News (2011), some of the emerging

technologies used in farming are (1) telematics, wherein it shows a map from a computer

to report all the operating vehicles with the fuel levels, how much product has been

applied or how much crop harvested. (2) Soil and crop sensors which determines plant

health and water needs in the crop to nitrogen levels in the soil. (3) Bus technology,

which combines multiple tractor cab screens intro a virtual terminal. And (4) Automated

grain off-loading which automatically guide grain carts alongside combines to improve

rapid cart filling.

Based on the technologies presented, it can be inferred that computer technologies

are contributing to the optimization of the farming methods.

In a pre-survey conducted in the Municipality of Oton of the Province of Iloilo, it

was found out that farmers do not use computer technologies to key-in important details

about their crops.

First, important information was gathered by the technician. Forms are used to

record details or information about the farmers profile and crops grown. This is a tiring
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process as the technician will have to visit the farmers one by one. After this, forms are

collected at the Department of Agriculture Oton Branch, the local farmer’s association,

and is grouped by folders and put in file cabinets.

This collated forms will then be used to monitor the farmers’ progress and be used

for future references. Since all the data that are gathered are just filed in file cabinets,

there are many forms or data that are lost due to age, termites or calamities. Because of

these factors, these sets of information make no meaningful data for the improvement of

the farms as there are no persons or technology that records these data and make the

conversion of the derived information. In comparison to more technologically equipped

countries, the production in this setting is minimal. Hence, this study.

Desired State of Technology

This study aims to have a systematic collection of data where easy retrieval,

searching, and analysis of data may happen. The data mentioned includes the farmers’

profile, basic information of the farmer such as name, highest educational attainment and

other personal information. Information about type of land tilled, the seeds race and

variety, the type and amount of fertilizers used and other materials is also included as

well as the amount of harvest produced by each farmer.

There should also be an estimation of time for the next steps such as schedule for

the ingress and egress of water, introduction of fertilizer, estimated schedule for the

harvest and other reporting.

These data will be analysed to produce reports that will determine the progress of

each farmer, their crop production rate and also the kind of techniques that is effective in
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each crops. Also, with the profile of farmers in every association, it is easy to determine

what kind of help a farmer need by just viewing their profiles and their progress reports.

There should be two levels of access. The first level will be for every member

association. This will allow a member association to input their farmers' data in the

system. They can also search, and retrieve farmer information and reports. However, they

can only access their own data and they cannot access other association's data. The

second level will be for the Farmer’s Association. It will also allow viewing of

information of all the members of Association under it, their reports and status.

There should also be prediction of production rate based on certain inputs in

capital, rice variety, farming techniques to be used and etc.

It is hoped that the ideas and techniques about good farming practices derived

from these data will be shared within the farmers association.

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Statement of the Problem

1. Collection and recording of farmer’s data are done manually which takes up

too much time and effort.

2. There is no single repository of data to store the collected information of the

farmers, making it difficult to track farmer’s records.

3. Farmer activities are not systematically monitored making it hard to track

progress of each farmer's farming progress.

4. There is no proper basis in analysing farming information which leads to

poor farming practices.

5. Progress reports coming from the different Association are hard to evaluate

because there is no coherence of information.

Objectives of the Study

General Objective

This study aims to design and develop Farming Information Management

System for Iloilo Farmer Association.

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Specific Objectives

1. To design a profiling module that will accept association and farmer

2. To provide a well-managed database that will consistently keep

farmer's records.

3. To develop an activity monitoring module that will track the activities

of farmers.

4. To develop a Statistical Analysis module that will be able to generate

efficient farming practices and predict crop production based on all of

the gathered farming information.

5. To develop a progress report module that will consolidate all

information collected from every farmer Association’ member.