AgroSpray

Reducing the time spent to manually spray farm lands and reduce the health risks accompanied by carrying out such strenuous activity.

Agriculture is one of the most popular activities carried out in Cameroon. 

With the ever growing population, the demand for food keeps on increasing and as such, the use of large acres of land is definite. With the farming of large amount of crops brings the problem of pests and plant diseases hence farmers will want to spray their farms to avoid a situation where they lose their crops because of this. In Cameroon, farming is still manual so if a farmer wants to spray his farm, he will be found with very large manual sprayers. This has been the case for decades now but this approach is not very efficient as it will take a very long amount of time if someone was to spray about 100 acres of land containing something like tomatoes and cocoa. This manual approach is not time efficient to the farmer and could cause serious health issues like back pain, chest pain and other heart diseases. Imagine one person carrying about 200liters of water in these sprayers each day. 

Infact, an article published by PubMed.gov talks about a survey conducted to 500 peasant farmers in South-West Nigeria about low back pain ad how it affected them. 51.9% of these farmers could not work as before while 34.3% could not work again due to this. Tella BA, Akinbo SR, Asafa SA, Gbiri CA. Prevalence and impacts of low back pain among peasant farmers in south-west Nigeria. Int J Occup Med Environ Health. 2013 Aug;26(4):621-7. doi: 10.2478/s13382-013-0135-x. PMID: 24235028.

So instead of these farmers focusing on yielding greater produce, the spend their time following up their medication.

So my proposed solution is the AgroSpray which uses drones to perform the spraying for the farmers.

AgroSpray uses heavy duty drones which could carry up to 5 liters coupled with a water pump spraying system to spray these pesticides onto the crops. These drones will be able to operate at long range and will contain a GPS so that where ever the pesticide finishes, upon refill will go and start at its previous stop point. It will also come with cameras so that the pilot will monitor the work. This way, farm lands will be sprayed in a shorter amount of time and the famers will not suffer from the health related issues cause ny the manual approach. 

This solution is targeting the farmers. Currently , a lot of farmers in my zone of preference go through lots of health challenges due to this manual spraying method which is very much time inefficient. With this solution, these health related issues farmers go through will reduce and the time needed to spray their farms will also reduce. 

Personally, i have worked in a farm before and i was asked to spray the farm. After the day's work, i was faced with so much back pain and i took so much time to do that piece of work.

I am currently studying Electrical and Electronic engineering and have worked in our small family farm for years now. The majority of people living in my community are farmers and when we come to talk about our harvest and how the planting season was, the issue they bring up is about how time consuming it is to spray their farms and the health issues accompanying these work. Having worked in a farm for years, i could empathize with them and began to look for ways to solve this problem.

I have worked in a farm for close to 5 years and basically when we plant crops, after some time we go back to spray pesticide on these crops to avoid pests and diseases and since most of the farms share boundaries with other farms, i have gotten the opportunity to talk with other farmers about this problem and their responses were all the same. They all want a very efficient way to spray their crops and minimize health related issues.

This solution is one of a kind to the farmers here. The fact that farmers will be able to get much work done using our solution at the comfort of their homes brings a different level of satisfaction. This will go a long way to automate farming.

Carrying out sensitization campaigns is what I intend  to do before presenting the solution to the farmers. This will be done through the agropastoral shows regularly held here. This way, farmers will then compare and see how this solution is going to help them. The health benefits it will bring and how time efficient it is.

The solution is going to work on heavy duty drones which will be able to move around with the pesticide , an electric pump which do the spraying , also some parts will be 3D printed and a camera and GPS will be installed which will go a long way to enable the pilot know where to start and stop spraying.

Currently, the solution does not serve anybody but hoping that through campaigns and shows, the solution will be able to impact 1000+  farmers locally.

The money required for me to actually realize this project is not available making to remain in the ideation phase.

Also, since I am building from scratch, where to buy the parts needed is hard to find where I live.