Digital Farmers' Produce System: A Cloud-based Platform for Optimizing Crop Management and Market Linkages

Abstract

Farming is the main livelihoods in Municipality of sinacaban, Misamis Occidental. Most farmers are crop producers as indicated by interview surveys with farmers and verified by the Municipal Agriculture Office. Common issues mentioned by farmers include lack of access to real time pricing information, connections to potential buyers, timing of buying transactions, and awareness of produce currently available at the barangay level. These result in smaller than desired profit margins for farmers and occasionally lost crops. This project aims to develop and deploy the Digital Farmers’ Produce System, a cloud- a cloud-based platform that allows farmers to post their available crops by season, request aid from their municipal agriculture office, and connect with buyers interested in their crops. The system allows farmers to post details of their produce availability and schedules, buyers can search for and view crop postings by region and crop category, and DA/MAO officers can view crops stock and request statuses per barangay. The system was built using PHP 8 and the Flight microframework, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Bootstrap, and MySQL it is using RAD development framework. Security and reliability measures included role-based permissions, HTTPS encryption, input validation, prepared queries, password hashing, and a backup strategy. User acceptance was gathered via survey from 12 participants, consisting of 5 farmers, 4 buyers, and 3 DA/MAO officers. With a positive user acceptance was observed, with mean ratings of 4.60 from farmers, 4.83 from buyers, and 4.69 from DA/ORO officers. While the results of this study are limited by the scope and available resources, they show promise that a localized, farmer-driven agricultural system can help improve market visibility as well as coordination between farmers and government agricultural institutions. More work would have to be done to ensure appropriate training is provided, all stakeholders can consistently connect to the system, and all security risks are mitigated before rollout.