I-Cas: Intelligent Crop Advisory System for Farmers

Abstract

Over the past three to four decades, the growth of population in India has raised the requirement of food grains. Though modern technology is supporting agriculture, the area of agriculture is getting declined day-by-day due to several reasons such as lack of water resources, lack of man power, and insufficient mechanism to disseminate necessary information to farmers. In this case, the use of technology is inevitable. Now a days, most of the government organizations attempts to implement technology based solutions which give rise to E-Governance especially in rural India. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a vital role in every domain but merely in Agriculture. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a latest technology which is capable of acquiring data from any environment with the help of sensors. The objective of this work is to develop a system, which acquires farm-field data, analyses with the help of agro-expert systems, predicts the type of cultivation based on the soil quality and disseminates viable information to the farmers with the aid of ICT and WSN. In general, in and around Dindigul district three types of soils are available viz., Laterite Soil, Black Soil and Red Soil. The main challenges in Dindigul district are to choose the type of cultivation in order to improve yield and that achieves better quality based on the chemical components of soil. Moreover, the cultivation depends on the parameters such as soil erosion, application of proper fertilizers, liming and proper irrigation. The benefit of this technology will reach the farmers at their door steps through Mobile Communication as Short Message Service (SMS) in their native language.