Customer
South African Sugar Research Institute, South Africa and Mauritius
Agriculture
Background info
SASRI & FIRCORP jointly needed to conduct a comprehensive survey of small-scale sugarcane farmers in South Africa and Mauritius. This survey included broad aspects such as: Socio-Demographic, farming practices, land management and household income.
Xcallibre Solutions has provided an innovative and exciting technology to enhance and streamline a comprehensive small-scale grower survey spanning 2 countries
Problem
Gain an in-depth understanding of the range of factors and constraints influencing their farming decisions and ultimately their productivity.
Many challenges faced SASRI and FIRCORP viz.:
- Rural Location of the small-scale farmers
- Capture and collation of consistent information
- Devising a methodology to facilitate and standardise data capture and comparisons between regions and countries.
Solution
Our highly skilled and experienced design team changed the layout and many fields in the survey, to make it easier to read and understand. Then the new survey form was enabled by our development team to accommodate the dot pattern design.
Each of the field agents was given a digital pen to capture the information and a cell phone. The information collected on digital form is then uploaded immediately via Bluetooth and GPRS technology to a central computer where there are stored, this cuts out the data capturing process that used to be in place. Getting to the rural farmers was not an issue as the technology is suitable for such remote data capture because applications are limitless and you can use the pen anywhere where there is GPRS enabled cellular network coverage.
Benefits
- Simpler, more effective survey form for the project.
- The new layout ensured a collation of consistent information from the field agents.