Development of mobile-based recommender system for smallholder dairy farmers to increase their production in Tanzania
Loading...
Date
2024-03
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
NM-AIST
Abstract
Dairy farming is a branch of agriculture which is devoted to the production of milk and the
processing of dairy products. Small holder farmers are individuals producing small amounts
of products on small land holdings of less than two (2) hectares. This study aimed to make a
recommendation model using association rules to suggest recommendations for dairy farm
management to smallholder farmers based on their farm details. The key objectives were to
identify requirements of the recommendation model, to develop the recommendation model,
to deploy and validate the model as an end user mobile tool. The study was conducted in
Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions in Tanzania. Systematic random sampling was used for data
collection, Apriori algorithm was used in recommendation model development and
incremental methodology was used in mobile application development. A recommender
system was developed through association rules mining to provide recommendations to the
smallholder dairy farmers that help them to increase their production using strategies
available from fellow farmers in the same cluster. These association rules were used to help
small holder dairy farmers to move from low milk production (9.15 3.25 litres) to medium
milk production (11.08 4.29 litres) and then to high milk production (14.45 5.12 litres)
gradually. The Dairy Recommender System mobile application with a recommendation
model deployed in the backend was developed for farmers to easily get information on how
to improve dairy farming practices.