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.