The Crop Expenses and Profitability module provides tools for farm financial management. It aids the farmer in recording their expenses so that he/she has a better picture of what it costs to produce a crop. It also allows the farmer to enter the amount harvested and ‘try’ different selling prices to see the effect on their profit. This record keeping will facilitate better management practices as well as enhance traceability and transparency for farmers. The data is anonymised and aggregated and data analytics applied to give national level agricultural data for decision making. Current, up-to-date price information is provided for farmers and consumers. Work in this module has resulted in the development of two applications, AgriExpense and AgriPrice.
The AgriExpense mobile application was developed to assist farmers to keep records of the operational cost of each crop cycle, by recording the crop expenses on the go and monitoring cost of production per unit harvested. The app allows the farmer to record the amount spent on materials he purchases (planting material, fertilizer, soil amendment, chemicals), and allocate portions of that purchase to the crops he has planted on the farm. He can also allocate the cost of manual labor associated with each crop. The app is able to produce an Excel spreadsheet of expenses related to a given crop cycle. If the farmer chooses to back up his data, it is uploaded to a Cloud platform (Google App Engine) from where Data Analytics can be applied to provide valuable information for policy makers. AgriExpense allows farmers to track their expenditure and sales, and to keep abreast of the profitability of their operations. AgriExpense is available freely on Google Play
The farmer can purchase items using any unit (lb, kg, litres) and can allocate usage of those items in a particular cycle in some other unit (e.g milliliters or gm or even %). The application will calculate how much of each item remains, and how much money the farmer has invested in that crop cycle so far. If he has hired labor for land preparation, sowing or harvesting, the cost of that labor is also factored in. The farmer at any time can view his running cost. The system performs aggregates based on spending, so that the farmer can see how much he spent on each category of expenses related to that crop cycle. When the crop is harvested, the farmer enters the amount of yield he harvests for a crop cycle. Using the app, he can enter determine his profit/loss based on different values of selling price per unit. The data can be backed up online, so that if the farmer loses his phone all his data is not lost. The farmer can sign in with multiple devices and have them all in sync with each other.
The AgriPrice application was built to let farmers or consumers keep track of the prices of various crops and be automatically notified when those prices change. Data from the Open Data repository is used to show up-to-date prices of crops sold in the markets in Trinidad. Users can select to be automatically notified of changes to the price of a particular crop. When notifications are turned on, each time the price of that crop changes by a significant amount a message is sent to their devices. The message is sent using push notification and it shows the crop’s name and the change in its price.