Simple smart way to keep farm records 

Developed by a graduating 24 year old Kisii University student, Eric Kamunge, Smartboma Farmers Assistant application is a simple yet effective mobile phone application that assists the farmer to keep farming records in an automated and standardised way.

The application keeps livestock health records, their disease records, records of population of the livestock affected by certain diseases, farm equipment and assets records and farm employees’ records among others.

In case of a crop or livestock disease, the farmer identifies its symptoms and feeds the details into the application on a mobile device, these details are then updated and fed into the central data system to enable identification of the disease and ways of curbing it, while storing and making the information still available to other farmers who access the application.

It also keeps records of all the farmer’s finances, inputs, assets, tools, equipment and also the farm employees.

The records are kept in the order of: identity of the tool or equipment, its value and its date of acquisition etc. for the farm inputs and equipment among others.

The farmer can also access the total value of the assets that he/she owns, and this report can be generated in form of word documents, pdf, excel, xps or html

RECORD KEEPING

According to the youngster, who hails from Embu, his farming background and the rudimentary and haphazard way in which farmers in the region kept their farming records, most especially tea records, motivated him to develop the application.

He indicates that farmers simply noted down their records in old exercise books and papers which were worn out in a short while, resulting to loss of the records and consequently, unaccountable financial losses in their farms.

The application, mainly intended especially for the low-end internet enabled mobile phones runs on limited-capability devices owned by many people due to their relatively low pricing.

Kamunge mentions that he is in the course of developing the application for smartphones running on the available operating systems and later on for computers, for a larger scale user interface.

Each farmer looks forward to making a profit in his/her venture and monitoring farm productivity, which is the main element in realising these profits, is made easier through proper record keeping, for which the application comes in handy.