Farm Crop Management System (FCMS)
The Government of Tamil Nadu envisages developing a ‘Farm Crop Management System (FCMS)’ that would aid and assist farmers in various aspects of crop management, helping them improve the quality and quantity of crops grown as well as bring in higher yields for the farmer. The government is attempting to implement level interventions through micro-level planning that can be assisted by the development of a system that could potentially enhance the information channels between farmers and the official machinery. The Farm Crop Management System will help in planning at individual farm levels, with an aim to bridge the yield gap backed with IT-enabled extension and strong marketing support. Through the system, the farmers would be issued advisories on various agriculture operations in addition to integrating the efforts of various stakeholders in the field of agriculture.
The development work began in February 2012. The first stage in developing this system is to build an integrated Farm Plan – Database Management through Mobile application in Tamilnadu. Comprehensive data covering regional details, personal details, mobile details, bank details, land details, details about group memberships, farm animals, farm equipment, plantation crops, wells, micro-irrigation, fodder crops grown, other activities such as beekeeping, sericulture, fisheries, agroforestry and other information about credit availability & requirement, inputs availability & requirement, farm equipment availability & requirement as also market availability & requirement, is to be collected from farmers in these six districts through mobile phone applications. Mobile phone based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) will also be used in data collection for limited fields such as personal details, mobile details, bank details and land details. The goal of the first stage of FCMS is to cover 32 districts of Tamil Nadu approaching nearly 80 lakh farmers for a baseline survey. Towards achieving the goal of the project, the Agricultural Secretary, Government of Tamil Nadu, has approached Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) for developing an Integrated Farm Plan – Database Management through mobile application. RTBI has presently successfully developed a mobile phone based application including IVR that will be used all over Tamil Nadu for conducting a baseline survey and will later also be involved in development of end-user applications that will help in micro-level planning.
Relay of agricultural advisory voice messages was started under the FCMS scheme as one of the early services and the aim was to provide comprehensive farm level advisory to a farmer based on the available farmer data. Considering the challenges that farmers faced while receiving and reading text messages, the Government chose to relay the advisory messages as voice messages in the local language, Tamil. The service started in August 2012, finally covered nearly 40 lakh farmers all over the State. The service had managed to deliver nearly 280 unique advisories and close to 3 million messages.