Application of information and communication technology in paddy farming: Toward information-based agriculture

Information and communication technologies have been hyped as the solution to solve the communication problem and poverty among the agriculture community in the developing countries. This paper introduces a mobile application which aimed to improve the information sharing and knowledge dissemination among the farming community in Malaysia. The developed system benefits the farming community by broadcasting farming related information through mobile devices, such as weather forecast, date of important farming activities, and advices on the use of pesticides and fertilizers. However, not all kind of communication technology or channel is practical as the current infrastructure might not support the new technology or the prospective users might not afford price of the technology. Thus the matching between the target users and the appropriate level of technology to be provided is vitally important in order for the technology to be actually utilized. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore the current communication infrastructure of the rice farming community in Malaysia, in order to identify the potential of applying new information and communication methods in the agricultural community. The findings of this study indicate that Short Message Service (SMS) is the most cost effective and practical method to disseminate information to the farming community at this point of time. However, if other communication channels such as Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and mobile Internet become widely supported by the target users' devices, they have great potential to replace the SMS method.