Design of a low-cost portable soil testing and crop recommendation device
Abstract
Agriculture plays a predominant role in the economic growth and development of the
country. The major and serious setback in crop productivity is that the farmers do not
carry out soil testing and therefore do not choose the right crop for cultivation. The high
costs to carry out soil testing, the tedious process for soil scientists, and the long periods
taken to test the sample in the laboratory make farmers deal away with performing the
soil testing on their farms.
In order to improve crop productivity, a soil testing and crop recommendation device is
to be developed that uses sensors to capture soil parameters, uses a machine learning
algorithm to analyze the parameter values to provide a crop recommendation, displays
the results on the device, and also sends them to the cloud server for storage in a MySQL
database for easy access. This low-cost portable device is to implement the laboratory
soil analysis procedures and the web portal to provide a display of real-time soil analysis
results and store analysed results in the cloud database. This Application also helps
save time and tedious, long laboratory processes.