ICT Applications in the Agriculture Industry

Information and communication technology is covering up most of human interactive areas and makes the life mush easier. We can see ICT applications from getting news to social networking.
But we can see that ICT applications are not mush into agriculture as much as it is bonded with other areas. Most of countries of the world are mainly depended on agriculture. And we can recognize Sri Lanka, our country as a country which has an agricultural economical system. But we don’t have much ICT interaction with our main economical factor.
When we consider ICT with agriculture we can see some main areas that we can mainly focus on. We can create a website where farmers and buyers can meet and discuss prices of their products. Farmers can put the price and amount they have and then buyers can bid on products and buy. These will really faster than the methods that we have now. And again this web site can be extended not only as an ebay but also where information about buyers and farmers can be added. And hosting a web site which contains all agricultural information in it will be also really helpful. And again we can develop a mobile back end application for farmers to inform via SMS about weather, right times to cultivate etc. And if we go more far we can use embedded systems to automate several parts of the cultivation process such as watering, fertilizing…etc.
So we can see that there are so many ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of agricultural industry by using information and communication technology. But there are obstacles. We can easily find software engineers to create ICT application regarding to agriculture. But lot farmers do not have ICT knowledge. In most countries we can see this as a common fact. In Sri Lanka we have this lack of knowledge and also the lack of infrastructure for ICT. For remote cities like Horowpathana there maybe not even internet available for people. And attitudes of people also matters in such big change. People may get afraid to interact with new technology.
Creating an ICT application is not a really big deal but the problem comes out when they try to distribute that application among farmers and other related personals. So the infrastructure for information and communication technology should be increased and the ICT literacy in the country also should be increased. So there should be special campaigns for targeted group of people.
If above requirements fulfilled and can establish a good ICT background for agricultural industry, it can be very easily developed. And it will make all processes faster and accurate than present scenario. In other hand more youngsters will be interested in agriculture than this context when agriculture is mixed up with new technology. So ICT application can be really benefitted for agricultural industry if they establish well and implement well.