Current status of smart agriculture and farmers in Nepal
2020
Abstract

Smart farming represents the application of modern ICT into agriculture to manage overall activities of farm, from increasing quality and quantity of products to gathering, processing, and dissemination of related information on an automated basis. The adoption of smart technologies in agriculture is a major necessity for increasing productivity and thus promotes sustainability of farm. This paper aims to analyze current status of agriculture in Nepal with respect to the usage of modern farming machineries and information technology. Through the questionnaire that consists of various distinct sections, this paper tries to assess the level of understanding of Nepalese farmers regarding various farming-related processes, application of digital communication for gathering and distributing information, and smart farming concepts. The results explain that the Nepalese farmers have not been able to grasp the concept of smart farming on an expected level. Implementation of smart farming methods have been very low; so far none of the agricultural farms have been fully automated with necessary tools and technologies. Farmers are able to gather information majorly through other farmers and commodity market. Smart communication devices such as computers and smart phones have not been effectively utilized for learning more effective farming mechanisms. Most farmers think that the lack of available resources and lack of expertise in community are major problems in implementing relatively new technology such as smart farming.

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Kalpana Karki, Faculty of Computer & Electronics, Acme Engineering College,
Kathmandu, Nepal

Dharmendra Mishra, Department of Computer & Electronics, Acme Engineering College, Kathmandu, Nepal

Ananta Adhikari, Faculty of Computer & Electronics, Acme Engineering College, Kathmandu,Nepal

Aicha Sekhari, Decision & Information Sciences for Production Systems,
University Lumiere Lyon 2, Lyon, France

Agriculture, Smart farming, ICT, Farmers