Development of a Mobile-Based Agricultural Advisory Application for Enugu State Farmers

Access to timely agricultural information remains a critical barrier to productivity improvement among smallholder farmers in Enugu State. This study develops a mobile-based agricultural advisory application designed to provide crop management guidance, weather updates, and market price information to farmers in rural Enugu communities. The application was built using Android Studio with Java as the primary programming language, backed by a RESTful API server developed in Node.js and a MySQL database. An advisory knowledge base was constructed in collaboration with agricultural extension officers from the Enugu State Ministry of Agriculture, incorporating locally relevant crop calendars and pest management protocols. The development methodology followed the Waterfall model, with structured phases for requirements gathering, system design, coding, testing, and deployment. Usability testing was conducted with 40 farmers and extension agents across three Enugu local government areas. Results show that the application successfully delivered relevant advisory content to users with basic smartphone literacy, with a task completion rate of 89 percent and an average loading time of under three seconds on 3G networks. User satisfaction scores averaged 4.1 out of 5. The study concludes that mobile technology can bridge the agricultural information gap for Enugu farmers when designed with local usability needs in mind. Future work should include offline functionality and Igbo language support.