Annals of R.S.C.B., ISSN:1583-6258, Vol. 25, Issue 4, 2021, Pages.

13652 - 13662
Received 05 March 2021; Accepted 01 April 2021.

Automation of Marketing and Sales of Agricultural Products

through a Mobile Application

Praveen Joe I R 1*, Dhanalakshmi R2, Hariteja Pandi.3, Siva Kumar D.4
and Manoj K S.5
1
Associate Professor, 2Professor,3,4,5UG Scholars
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
KCG College of Technology, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India.
*
praveenjoeir@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT
Farming is the Prime Occupation in India, in spite of this; today the people involved in farming
have become marginalized and are in deep poverty. Advanced techniques and automated
machines which are leading the planet to new heights, are lagging behind when it is concerned
to farming, either the shortage of awareness of the advanced facilities or the unavailability of
the same leads to a devastating situation. Even being very diligent and productive, neither the
farmers nor the common man could enjoy the benefits.In today‟s market, farmers are cheated
by the agents and brokers and a lengthy supply chain does not help them to yield the desired or
even a nomnal profit. Now, introducing agri-marketing would make all things automatic and
thereby make the marketing and selling process easier, serving as THE best solution to all the
problems. This will serve as a way for the farmers to sell their products across their reachable
zones just with some basic knowledge about how to operate on the mobile app without much
difficulty. This app will guide the farmers altogether the aspects, the present market rate of
various products, the entire sale and therefore increased profit, improved access to the new
farming techniques through e-Learning and a centralized approach to look at different
government‟s agriculture schemes including the compensation schemes for farming. Through
this app the farmers can have extended communication with a wide range of customers and
also with the government and thus help them sell a variety of products through a single mode or
Point of Sale (PoS) and do enable them to claim the various compensation schemes offered by
the government.

Keywords: Farmers, Agri-marketing, Supply chain, e-Learning, Agriculture schemes

Introduction

Information Technology provides several solutions in agricultural

production and marketing [1]to improve agricultural productivity and there are
different technologies available in agricultural research institutes [2]. These
technologies afford the agriculture industry to increase information flow to all
participants of other industries at a decreased cost [4]. Many factors influence
the knowledge sharing of agricultural extension [6], e-agriculture plays a major
role in development of rural areas in India [8], and is the way by which aspired
and expertise individuals impart insight of agricultural activities and
understanding to various future strategies to another individuals and farmer
communities, so that the updated knowledge can be used to execute farming

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operations using advanced methodologies [9]. It gives the information for

farmers to access data related to crops and firm management and deals with
advanced technologies employed in agriculture [11]. Agricultural marketing
plays an important role in moving product from producers to consumers [10]
and it is crucial in improving the performance in agricultural farming assuch
[12]. In order to increase agricultural productivity and decrease the poverty
among farmers, new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) [15]
tools are introducted to enhance agricultural processes and to educate rural
communities about the importance of the significance of emerging technologies
in their production process [13]. An e-portal can make the farmers to
communicate directly with the customers and get required information [16]
about prices of crop in markets [14].There has to be direct relationship and
communication between the farmers and customers to increase the profit
margin and it must be ensured that they get the right yield for all their efforts
[3].

Related Work

Government, private agencies and general public are often curious about
the choices made by the Indian farmers as they need large influences beyond
the farm boundary. More than 200 million Indians are agricultural laborers as
of 2013. They alone contribute to quite 13.7 % after the GDP growth of India.
Agriculture clearly remains one among the foremost important portfolios in
enabling the growth of Indian economy as a whole.

The upliftment and improvement of rural livelihoods of these

communities will lead farmers being abled to pursue thier profession in a
productive way. Over many years, the process of adoption of new technologies
and policies within the Indian agricultural sector has received considerable
academic attention highlighting the role of the many social, financial and other
influences on their deciding.

For India, over the last decade, the markets in both developed and developing
countries have been flooded by mobile phones, tablets, and other pervasive
devices .This system allows the user to login and provide his details in the login
page. The users are differentiated either as a seller or a buyer based on the
category they opt to. The sellers are required to update their product details
frequently. The buyers can search for the products. The search item is mapped
to the corresponding sellers and their details are retrieved onto the search page.
The buyers can choose the sellers from the list. Once a product is updated the
users who have searched it will be notified.

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AgriApp provides complete information on Crop Production, Crop

Protection and every one relevant agriculture allied services. It also enables
farmers to access all the knowledge associated with “High value, low product”
category crops from varieties, soil/ climate, to harvesting and storage
procedures. A choice to chat with experts, video-based learning, the newest
news, online markets for fertilizers, insecticides etc. are also available on this
app (www.fugenx.com/portfolio/agriapp/).Earlier,IFFCO Kisan Agriculture
applica-tion launched in 2015 helped the farmers to make appropriate decisions
through customized information management related to their needs.This
application allows the users to access a variety of modules like weather, market
prices, agriculture information library in the form of text, images, audio and
videos in a chosen language.This application also provides helpline numbers to
post their queries with kisan call centre services
(www.iffcokisan.com/home/).Kissan Suvidhais an application launched in 2016
to work towards empowerment of farmers and development of villages and this
application offers a user friendly interface. It provides weather information and
also forecast for next 5 days, market prices of crop in nearest town, knowledge
on machinery, seeds, fertilizers etc (www.mygov.in/group-issue/kisan-suvidha-
smart-mobile-app-farmers/).

Theunion Agriculture Minister in 2016 launched the application called

Pusa Krishi and aim to help farmers to get notification about technologies
developed Indian agricultural research institute (IARI), which helps in
increasing returns of farmers. The information related to new varieties of crops
developed by Indian Council of agriculture research (ICAR) will be provided to
the farmers in this app, also resource conserving cultivation practices as well as
farm machinery and its implementation will help in increasing returns to
farmers (diligentias .com/kisan-suvidha-mobile-app-pusa-krishi-mobile-
app/).Another application named RML Farmer is one that enable farmers to
keep up with product prices, using of fertilizers and pesticides precisely,
weather forecast and farmer related news. It also provides news about
government's agricultural schemes and policies and agricultural advice. This
application allows the users to choose from over 3500 weather locations, 450
crops varieties and 1300 mandis across 50,000 villages and 17 states of India. It
works with the help of specific tools designed to provide or analyse information
on different aspects of farming habits
(www.engineeringforchange.org/solutions/product/rml-farmer-krishi-mitr/).
Examples: CropDoc helps in identifying problems that affects crop at right time
and suggests corrective actions(nextgen.iupac2019.be/2019/01/08/develop
pment-of-an-android-mobile-application-for-crop-protection-
cropdoc/).FarmNutriprovides personalized and general nutrient
recommendations, which are in the form of a fertilizer dosage
(krishijagran.com/agripedia/nutrition-farming-gaining-attention-in-india/).

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Proposed Methedology

The proposed system is a mobile app for selling the agricultural products
to the markets. The application is included with features like the buyer will be
notified about the sudden fluctuations about the prices. The buyer will be able
to contact the seller with the provided details by the seller. This application
accepts the user‟s details while they login and classifies them to either seller or
a buyer. All the user details are stored in a database. The seller can update the
product details like the type and quantity. The search item of the buyer is
mapped to the sellers having that item. The seller details are extracted based on
their products. The database is frequently updated with the prices from
government portal. When a product detail is updated by the seller the buyers
who searched are notified. There are different modules in this application.

User Registration Module

Application allows two types of users Farmers (Sellers) and Customers
(Buyers). Registration process is same for both farmers and customers. While
doing registration user needs to select the type of user and location of the user
and then enters the basic details of the user like name, contact number and mail.
After entering the basic details now the user is allowed to create the username
and pasasword. While creating username first user needs to check the username
is already used or not . If the username is not used by anyone the user can
proceed to create the password. Suppose username is already is used by
someone else then user needs to enter new username to proceed for creating
password. After entering username and password user needs to clink on the
submit button to upload the username, password and other basic details in the
database.

User login module

After creating username and password through the registration module

then automatically redirects to the login module where the user can enter the
username and password to login to the application.If username and password
entered are not correct then user needs to reenter the correct details. If the
details entered are correct then user will be allowed to access the homepage of
the application where the user can check the prices of the products.

Product Price Checking Module

In this module, after successful login to the application the user is allowed
to see the minimum, maximum price of product given by the government and
product prices in different markets in their nearest location. This minimum and
maximum price of product will be fixed by the government and will update the

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prices in database through the government portal. From database the product
prices fixed by the government will be displayed in this module.

Product Upload Module

In this module, Farmers can update the products that has harvested. To
update the product from this module user needs to enter the necessary details
like the quantity of the product and expecting price to the sell the product.By
updating product from this module will go to customer as a notification.
Suppose the customer is looking for some product, if farmer updates such type
of product then it directly notifies to the customer with the farmer details in the
notification module.

Notification Module

In this module, whenever the farmer updates the product that the farmer
has, then notification goes to all customers in the nearest locations. These
notifications can be seen by the customers in the notification list, notifications
contain the details such as product name, price of the product and contact
details of the farmer. As well as, customers can post the requirement of
products that they need, this notification goes to all the farmers in the nearest
location, if farmers have product they can contact with customers. This
customer notification contains the same details as farmer notification.

Implementation of Proposed System

This mobile application is connected to the firebase backend. All the data
entered through this application will be stored in firebase storage. Since the
firebase database stores all its data in JSON tree format which is used to
represent data in JSON document. The data stored in JSON document has well
formatted structure.If the stored data is in well formatted structure then it is
easy to write the data as well as to retrieve data and also on the structured data
querying becomes easy.The structure of the database should be construct before
reading and writing the data into the firebase database. In this application all the
user details entered during registration stored in database and whenever the user
need to login to the app then it checks in the database whether the user is
registered already or not.Whenever the government updates the prices of each
product then it will update in firebase database.One of the better feature of
firebase is data synchronisation is used in real time ,whenever the data updates
through the application from Farmer interface that will reflect immediately on
customer interface. Figure 1 depicts the entire system architecture.

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A
A

Figure1. SystemArchitectureDiagram

Suppose farmer post the product that immediately notifies in customer

notification module. A sample JSON format structure for the data stored in the
firebase database is shown in Figure 2.

Figure2. Sample JSON Format Structure

Figure 2 is an example structure of how the firebase database stores the data
and updates the same. And this data will be shown to the user based on the
module that is being used by the user.

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Results

Figure 3. Price of the products Figure 4. Prices of the product in

Different markets

The outcome of the application is that the farmer can check the minimum price
and maximum price of the products given by the government and as well as the
current minimum and maximum prices of the products in different markets of
same location as shown shown in the Figure 3. In Figure 4, the different market
prices of the product are shown as well as if farmer wants to sell the product in
particular market can also contact directly with the customers.And also if
farmer wants to sell the product for someother price which is not current price
in the market can be placed in the application , it will be displayed to the
customer and if customer wish to buy with farmer suggested price then
customer can contact with the farmer.

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Figure 5. Notification Module

If the customer needs to buy produts then he can update the quantity of product
needed in the application which will be displayed to the farmer with customer
contact details in the notification module as shown in the Figure 5. If the farmer
is having that product then farmer can contact with the customer to sell the
product.

Discussions

In this application, all transaction made are detailed which displays the
limpidity in the system. Some of the key issues that are to be highlighted in the
application to benchmark the work in comparison with the previous works in the
literature are as follows: i) The quality of food supply chains is enhanced and
yields are disposed within the specified time limits with an average duration of
12 hours which was earlier 48 hours. ii) Price alert are given every now and then
which is found missing in earlier popular apps. Traditional apps merely take
commodity prices & farm produce data sourced from Govt. of India and display
in their app. iii)It has a Geo-tagging of farm produce which permits map based
identification of procurement source. There is a direct deal between the
agriculturalists and buyers without any middlemen or broker. iv) It is
comprehensible and customer centric agriculture application to discover market

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price of crops far stress-free for the user with the assistance of Global
Positioning System (GPS). The application allows a user detect the market price
of the crops within 25 Kms of the device‟s location which was 50 kms in the
literature. v) Technically speaking, applets end user is allowed to column
whatever is related to agriculture in a minute‟s time. He / She can click a picture
and upload a shot, just enter the particulars of the product, clicks submit Ad and
promptly end user‟s Ad will be displayed which was time-consuming earlier. vi)
The app enables chat, seller or buyer can chat with ready-made text templates,
facts can be pooled by e-mail and then they can discuss the deal on a phone
contact or through any suitable means.

The apps that are proposed in the literature many not have all the above
mentioned features in one roof but the present proposal caters to all the possible
avenues for effective marketing and sales.

Conclusion and Future Scope

This application can be further enhanced to add the module to raise the
complaints by the user to the government if any disaster occurs and damage
happens to the crop then user can update the images of dagamed crop with
necessary details from the application, if the government confirms that the
damage occurs to the srop is true then the farmer will get the disaster relief fund.

The Big Data environment is a massive toolwith the potential for creating
various applications for researches, farmers and policy makers. Agricultural
domain is a context rich environment. It possesses several distinct requirements
thanks to sort of land, weather and crops everywhere the planet. The collected
information can be effectively utilised only when it could model the situation in
a well mannered way. The main focus is to create a quantum change in the
agricultural community by harnessing digital technology.

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Received 05 March 2021; Accepted 01 April 2021.

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