Cell Phone-A Decision Support for Sustainable Crop Protection

Use of cell phone would be the need of the hour in respect to decision making power of the farmers. The objective of this work was to disseminate regular crop advisory, crop monitoring, crop pest surveillance and crop pest forecasting to farmers for sustainable crop protection through mobile based programmes comprising of SMS alert and direct contact between crop doctors and beneficiaries. Two hundred numbers of progressive farmers/rural youth from farm families and twenty resource persons were trained up as beneficiaries on different aspects of integrated crop management options before starting this study. The beneficiaries were expressing more interest to update themselves. Based on the foot falls along with other farmers to KVK had been significantly increased for obtaining more information against a specific problem. The other important findings of this study among the targeted beneficiaries were (i) the dependency on others for pest or crop management had been reduced, (ii) the decision making power for pest management had been significantly improved, (iii) the skills and attitude towards bio-intensive pest management was developed, (iv) the entrepreneurship development among resource persons by providing various services to farmers was successful.