Framework Model for a Soil Suitability Decision Support System for Crop Production in Nigeria

摘要

A typical problem is faced in Nigeria, where agricultural lands are largely underutilized and mostly suffering from degradation leading to an unmitigated food security problem. Currently, food production growth rate in Nigeria remains unable to feed its fast growing population. This is largely attributed to the farm management practices on agricultural lands employed in crop production. A step in the right direction is to provide a central repository of data and knowledge where decision support on the best crop production practices to provide optimum yield in quality and quantity is made available in a view easily interpreted by the chief implementers, which in this case are the local farmers. This can be accomplished in part by building a system to provide soil suitability decision support. In this paper, a framework for building a soil suitability decision support system (SSDSS) to tackle the problem of poor farming methods and low crop growth is presented. It documents a solution of coordinating the diverse nature of variables faced by the decision-maker in the crop production process into a software system that would support decision making activities and hide the user of the system from the technicalities and complexities of the underlying data.