Farm App

Farm App is an application designed to help farmers to predict reliable onset days. It also gives farmers access to the dry spell risks associated with the planting season depending on the onset strategy used for onset. Cessation dates for the different planting strategy is also provided for by the application.

This application is designed to cater for maize farmers of Uasin Gishu County only, the bread basket of Kenya. This application was designed in line to help facilitate food security in the country that recently has proved to be of national concern. The unpredictable weather patterns have over the past few years, made farming in Uasin Gishu County challenging. The rains have come early, delayed or rained in abundance. This has resulted in crop failure due to poor planning by the farmers. A good example is the years 2017 where the rains delayed resulting in many farmers having to replant due to crop failure and the 2018 where the rains came early and in abundance getting the farmers not ready to plant with some having not even prepared their farms. All these have an impact to the yield and translate to food security issues.

This application tries to solve the above problem by analyzing the historical rainfall of uasin Gishu County. It takes into account daily rainfall for six weather stations, Eldoret Meteorological station, Eldoret international Airport Meteorological station, Turbo weather station, Moiben Weather station, Timboroa weather station and Moi University weather station. It analyzes the rainfall data in the sequence discussed;

Onset of the planting season is first defined to be a day between 1st of March and 20th of April, and during this period there should be an initial rain of at least 40mm for a period of four consecutive days. The day meeting the above criteria define onset for each respective year. These onsets for the past 32 years are fit into a distribution and probabilistic analysis done. From the analysis, the onset strategies are defined as to be either very early (0.1), early (0.2), normal (0.5), late (0.8) or very late (0.9). These days are given to the farmer to choose on the favorable strategy of choice after accessing the probability levels of success of the respective strategies.

Depending on the strategy selected, the maize crop will grow through the different stages to maturity to attain the desirable yield. This application, depending on the strategy selected by the farmer is able to indicate the probability of experiencing dry spells in each of the seasons; initial, development, middle and final stage. A dry spell is defined as a period of ten consecutive days with no rain at all. The application is able to calculate the possible end of rains for the season of the different respective onset strategy selected. This is defined as the cessation.

It is of my view of this application will be of great assistance to farmers in planning and coordinating their farming activities. In future this application will continue to work on other factors apart from rainfall that influence farming. Please download and review my app….cheers!