A low cost portable device for crop and fertilizer recommendation

Abstract

Agriculture is the backbone of Uganda’s economy and it plays a very important role in the economic development of the country .However most farmers lack knowledge about the quantity of the nutrients in the soil and likewise the appropriate crop to grow in order to maximize yields. The high costs for soil testing, the tedious process for soil scientists and the long periods to test the sample in the laboratory make farmers abandon performing soil testing and keep using guess work . In order to improve crop productivity a soil testing , crop production and crop recommendation device is developed that uses sensors to capture soil parameters, uses IOT based technology to analyze the soil parameters and displays the results on the screen and also displays them on a dash board in real-time makes access very easy .This low cost portable device is used to display the soil testing results on the web portal in real time and stores the analyzed results on a cloud data base. This application helps to save time and tedious long laboratory processes.