A Tool-Kit Design for Soil Testing: A Sustainable Agricultural Approach

ABSTRACT

The rice is the world most important food crop and around 4 billion people using it as primary food. India is the second largest rice producer in international forum, which contributes around 10% of the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of country in agricultural, foresting and fishing sector (As per statisitcstimes.com). However, production rate needs to be improved proportionally with population of country, at the same time the challenges to rice cultivation in the country increases day by day due to quality of soil, scarcity of labour, wages, irrigation, fertilizers, diseases, industrialization etc. The proposed work becomes mandatory to be implemented to increase the rice yields. However, the precision Agriculture (PA) is a recent technology which includes IoT, Data science, Machine and Deep learning, which can increases crop yield considerably, but using PA becomes difficult due to cost, infrastructure, expertise etc, The benefits of Precision Agricultural includes effective management of irrigation, crop diseases, crop yield, soil quality and pest control. Even though preserving ecological system is also equally important to secure next generation, environment, and health. This paper has proposed an integrated IoT based device to measure 12 primary nutrients required for rice production, which are classified as macro and micro nutrients. The results of work can be used to measure the nutrients level in soil, which can help farmers to decide the volume of fertilizer to support ecofriendly environment, increase the profit of rice cultivation and maintain the soil quality as strong as possible by avoiding unwanted chemigation. The proposed work also includes the advantages of Precision Agriculture with traditional practice, together called as Sustainable Agriculture (SA).

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