Voruganti Surendra is a farmer who grows paddy rice on an acre of farmland in Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh.  He and hundreds of his fellow farmers are using a new app that can recognise a growing number of crop pests and diseases and give advice on how to treat them.  “It is very useful,” he says. “Farmers need it.”

Source: BBC Technology News

Date: October 18th, 2017

Link: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41580890

Discussion

1) “It was really important for us to understand what farmers wanted,” says Charlotte Schumann, co-founder of Peat (Progressive Environmental & Agricultural Technologies) the company behind the app, “so we did a lot of groundwork in India”.   Systems analysis is a critical part of any app development.  What sorts of questions might have been asked during this systems analysis phase?

2) “The farmer photographs the damaged crop and the app identifies the likely pest or disease by applying machine learning to its growing database of images.”   What sort of work is needed to set up this app?