Development and Diffusion Strategies of Agricultural Production History Management Systems

• Published in: JARQ. Japan agricultural research quarterly 2018/04/01, Vol.52(2), pp.131-135
• Main Author: ITOH, Atsushi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: cloud service; IT literacy; production process management; Web API
• ISSN: 0021-3551; 2185-8896
• DOI: 10.6090/jarq.52.131

Incidents and accidents involving food items occur frequently, which is why consumers put high emphasis on the safety of food products. Farmers must manage the crop production process efficiently and maintain records related to food safety. This kind of paperwork places a heavy burden on farmers. Therefore, we developed a system utilizing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that can help farmers easily and efficiently manage the agricultural production process. In Japan, the average age of farmers is more than 65 years old, and their IT literacy is lower compared to the workforce in other industries. Therefore, a system that requires the use of IT devices is not likely to penetrate the agricultural sector. We have developed a system for managing the agricultural production process that allows every farmer to use IT equipment without any problems; the design of the system takes into account both users and non-users of IT equipment. By conducting demonstration experiments, we confirmed that all farmers could use our system. Moreover, enhancing the system’s maintainability and scalability by utilizing web application programming interface (Web API) design allows our system to be interoperable with other systems, and helps highlight the potential of our system to become a comprehensive platform for agricultural information in the future.