DEVELOPING A CLOUD-BASED MULTI-STAKE DATA CONSOLIDATION AND ADVISORY FRAMEWORK FOR SUSTAINABLE FARMING

Abstract

In developing countries like Ethiopia, agriculture is the pillar source of the economy that maintains food security and fulfills other basic living standards. Ethiopia has faced the typical challenges of inadequate and unorganized communication among various stakeholders for farming professional support and advisories. The current systems are time-consuming, costly, and sometimes have inappropriate advisory support for Ethiopian farming. After a pre-research context analysis of the existing farm advisory systems, the researcher developed a multi stakeholder data consolidation and advisory framework over the cloud for sustainable farming in Ethiopia. This research focuses on selected agricultural issues for exploration in Ethiopia to enhance the management of agriculture support and advisories. Due to the emergence of technologies, cloud-based multi-stakeholder data consolidation and advisory frameworks are being developed to solve the numerous problems required for sustainable development. This research explores the possible cloud computing intervention in Ethiopian farming to support them through numerous advisories in alleviating the salient agriculture challenges quickly and cost-effectively. Initially, this research examines and evaluates (utilizing a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) approach) the issues present within the existing agricultural advisory and support systems. Subsequently, it employs an exploratory design to explore the potential of cloud computing applications in addressing the identified challenges. Finally, an applied research design is employed to develop the advisory framework and its generic solution. The generic solution design is a multi-stakeholder data consolidation and advisory for the Ethiopian farming sector using the cloud to provide support services. The research contributes to the economy of scale through the growth of agricultural products through coordinated activities of farmers, development agents, heads of agriculture departments, and the Ministry of Agriculture using cloud computing.