e-roso, a digital tool for farming operations

The Fifata group, supported by the agri-agency Fert, has been working for many years to enable farmers to take better account of economic aspects to guide their decisions. Since 2022, a partnership has been developed with CIRAD and IT service provider Khameos to develop a digital tool, e-roso, available as an Android application and web portal, to optimize technical-economic advice to producers.

The e-roso tool facilitates the entry and recording of technical and economic data on the digital tablet used by agricultural advisors, based on information recorded in the growers' notebooks. It also enables growers to visualize the results of these recordings directly, by means of data summary tables and various graphs. This visualization aspect is important to improve understanding and decision-making by growers.

e-roso screenshot: potato production statistics from a Malagasy farmer in the Anlamanga region

For over 15 years, CIRAD's Aïda unit has been designing and implementing robust, intuitive tools to support agricultural advisors and monitoring-evaluation units in agroecological development projects in several African and South-East Asian countries. From data entry in the field, via tablets or smartphones, to the development of dashboards for decision support and online maps, these tools are licensed open source and reusable in different contexts. We involve users right from the design of the tools and the definition of specifications. The agile method we follow involves prototyping and successive tests, in close collaboration with the project team. We ensure technology transfer and training for our IT partners, so that they are autonomous in system maintenance. Reliable and secure data management has become essential for producer organizations and monitoring-evaluation units.