AgroConsultant: Intelligent Crop Recommendation System Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Agriculture is a major contributor to the Indian economy. The mainstream Indian population depends either explicitly or implicitly on agriculture for their livelihood. It is, thus, irrefutable that agriculture plays a vital role in the country. A vast majority of the Indian farmers believe in depending on their intuition to decide which crop to sow in a particular season. They find comfort in simply following the ancestral farming patterns and norms without realizing the fact that crop output is circumstantial, depending heavily on the present-day weather and soil conditions. However, a single farmer cannot be expected to take into account all the innumerable factors that contribute to crop growth before reaching a consensus about which one to grow. A single misguided or imprudent decision by the farmer can have undesirable ramifications on both himself as well as the agricultural economy of the region. A combination of Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning can effectively help alleviate this issue. In this paper, we present an intelligent system, called AgroConsultant, which intends to assist the Indian farmers in making an informed decision about which crop to grow depending on the sowing season, his farms geographical location, soil characteristics as well as environmental factors such as temperature and rainfall.