CronosPlantio application helps farmers manage banana and guaraná crops

With the aim of assisting farmers in managing management activities, over time, of banana and guaraná crops, Embrapa Amazônia Oeste (AM) is making CronosPlantio available, a free application available in the Embrapa store on Google Play for Android systems.

The application was developed by Embrapa analyst Marcos Filipe Salame, with support from researchers Mirza Carla Normando Pereira and Firmino José do Nascimento Filho, who provided technical information on banana and guaraná crops, respectively. The work also included the collaboration of student Daniel Bispo do Vale, a scientific initiation scholarship from the Amazonas State Research Support Foundation (Fapeam). Vale worked on the coding and images used in the technology.

The way the technology works is very simple. The user creates a new record according to the desired culture and fills in the requested fields with data such as culture, species and date when pit fertilization began. With this, the software automatically presents the activities with the respective dates to be carried out. For example, when carrying out each top dressing, chemical control of banana black Sigatoka, among other actions. They were defined based on several studies carried out by researchers in the area to obtain good planting efficiency. If the user performs any of the activities on different dates, he can modify the data, and all subsequent activities are automatically changed.

The activities present very objective guidelines and each of them can include observations in a text format similar to a diary. Before each action, at a defined time, the application issues a reminder in the device's notification area about the activity.

Salame says that the application was developed for the reality of Amazonas, and can be used in any location in the state. In addition to working offline, that is, without the need for an internet connection, it requires little processing power and little storage space.

The development

The idea for creating the application came about after conversations between the analyst and researchers Mirza Pereira and Firmino Filho in order to help banana and guaraná productivity. After the requirements engineering process, development began, with the insertion of technical information about the two agricultural crops.

The researcher says that the idea arose from her own difficulty in managing the management calendar of the different areas of Technological Reference Units (URT), as Embrapa's experimental areas are called. She had to coordinate banana cultivation actions in different locations at the same time. Banana farming requires four top dressings just to produce the first bunch and these activities are scheduled every two or three months.

Other actions such as tillering and chemical control of black Sigatoka have always caused many difficulties for technicians and producers in knowing when to start the process. With the application, these dates are generated automatically, from the moment the user informs the date of fertilization of the pits. So, there is no need to worry about writing down and calculating these dates. The user will only have to pay attention to the reminders that the application will send about the next steps.

For technicians, who often provide assistance to several producers at the same time, the application generates a calendar for each area assisted, which makes it easier to manage plantation monitoring.

The application validation test was supported by technicians from the Institute for Sustainable Agricultural and Forestry Development of the State of Amazonas (Idam), a rural extension body, which supports Embrapa's transfer actions. The institution showed interest in the application and in including the tool to help with its routine activities.

For Salame, the application demonstrates that a simple tool is capable of optimizing and facilitating large and small agricultural activities.

CronosPlantio is the second application developed by Salame and researchers at Embrapa Amazônia Oeste. In April 2018, Nutrisolo was launched, which helps agricultural technicians and producers calculate the need for fertilization and soil liming. The technology provides fertilization recommendations for pineapple, citrus, banana and cassava crops in the state of Amazonas, carrying out calculations based on the results of chemical analyzes of the soil. The app was also developed with support from Fapeam and is available for free download on Google Play.