If you ever want to plant a tree, you need not worry anymore about which trees to plant. You don’t even need to ask sellers of plant seeds for advice.
Now there is an Android-based mobile application called DutyPlant (Land Suitability for Plantation) to help you with rapid evaluation of land suitability for plants. The app will help us pick what kind of plants will be the right ones for our land.
It is Karina Inassyiva Rosmala, Agriculture UGM student and Prawira Jalu Nindita, Computer Science student, making the app. The app will help us know the suitability of land as well as what barriers will emerge.
"Evaluation of land suitability in agriculture based on smartphone application is used to know the suitability and its environment condition for certain commodities,” said Karina on Thursday at UGM (13/10).
Karina explained that after installing the app, the app works by choosing the commodities and entering parameters for evaluation such as temperature, soil humidity, slope level, etc. You can also select the commodities, such as clove, oil palm, sugarcane, tea, pineapple, and cocoa.
"We need to submit the data that are required, then a display will pop up to say if the land is suitable for cloves or not. Diplay s1 means very suitable, s2 suitable, s3 less suitable, and N not suitable. Then a limiting factor will also pop up, which tells what factor limits the land from being very suitable,” she said.
Karina further lamented the manual land evaluation using guidebook that is seen as impractical, inaccurate as well as time consuming.
"We need to make a breakthrough using current technology, which is android-based smartphone app, namely DutyPlant: Land Suitability for Plantation," she added.
Due to their innovation, both students became the second winner in the Agriculture Innovation Competition as part of the Gadjah Mada Agro Expo 2015 series. They also won the 2 C-Compiler (Competition of Computer Science and Electronics Student 2015).
Dean of Faculty of Agriculture UGM, Dr, Jamhari, S.P., M.P, appreciated their work. He said the app would help resolve problems faced by farmers, expecially in agriculture endeavours in large scales.