Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture Industry

Agriculture plays a crucial role in the economic sector of each country. Population around the world is increasing day by day, and so is the authoritative ordinance for aliment. The traditional methods that are utilized by the farmers are not ample to consummate the desideratum at the current stage. Hence, some incipient automation methods are introduced to gratify these requisites and to provide great job opportunities to many people in this sector. Artificial Perspicacity has become one of the most paramount technologies in every sector, including edification, banking, robotics, agriculture, etc.

role and it is transforming the agriculture industry. AI preserves the agriculture sector from different factors such as climate change, population magnification, employment issues in this field, and aliment safety. Today's agriculture system has reached a different caliber due to AI. Artificial Astuteness has amended crop engendered and authentic-time monitoring, harvesting, processing, and marketing. Different hi-tech computer-predicated systems are designed to determine sundry paramount parameters such as weed detection, yield detection, crop quality, and many more.

Lifecycle of Agriculture

Overview

• Understand what is Artificial Astuteness
• Lifecycle of agriculture
• Challenges faced in Agriculture with traditional farming techniques.
• How we can surmount challenges in Agriculture with the Application of AI in Agriculture

We can divide the Process of Agriculture into different parts:

Preparation of soil: It is the initial stage of farming where farmers prepare the soil for sowing seeds. This process involves breaking sizably voluminous soil clumps and abstract debris, such as sticks, rocks, and roots. Additionally, integrating fertilizers and organic matter depend on the type of crop to engender an ideal situation for crops.

Sowing of seeds: This stage requires taking care of the distance between two seeds, and the depth for planting seeds. At this stage climatic conditions such as temperature, sultriness, and rainfall play a consequential role.

Integrating Fertilizers: To maintain soil fertility is a paramount factor so the farmer can perpetuate to grow nutritious crops and salubrious crops. Farmers turn to fertilizers because these substances contain plant nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Fertilizers are simply planted nutrients applied to agricultural fields to supplement the required elements found naturally in the soil. This stage withal determines the quality of the crop

Irrigation: This stage avails to keep the soil moist and maintain sultriness. Underwatering or overwatering can hamper the magnification of crops and if not done congruously it can lead to damaged crops.

Weed auspice: Weeds are unwanted plants that grow near crops or at the boundary of farms. Weed auspice is consequential to factor as weed decreases yields, increases engendered cost, interfere with harvest, and lower crop quality

Harvesting: It is the process of accumulating ripe crops from the fields. It requires an abundance of laborers for this activity so this is a labor-intensive activity. This stage withal includes post-harvest handling such as cleaning, sorting, packing, and cooling.

Storage: This phase of the post-harvest system during which the products are kept in such a way as to assure victuals security other than during periods of agriculture. It additionally includes packing and conveyance of crops.

Challenges faced by farmers by utilizing traditional methods of farming

Listing down general challenges that subsist in the agricultural domain.

o In farming climatic factors such as rainfall, temperature and sultriness play a paramount role in the agriculture lifecycle. Incrementing deforestation and pollution result in climatic changes, so it’s arduous for farmers to take decisions to prepare the soil, sow seeds, and harvest.

o Every crop requires categorical alimentation in the soil. There is 3 main nutrients nitrogen(N), phosphorus(P) and potassium(K) required in soil. The deficiency of nutrients can lead to poor quality of crops.

As we can visually perceive from the agriculture lifecycle that weed bulwark plays a consequential role. If not controlled it can lead to an incrementation in engendering cost and additionally, it absorbs nutrients from the soil which can cause pabulum deficiency in the soil.

 Impact of AI on agriculture

The technologies which are AI-based help to improve efficiency in all the fields and also manage the challenges faced by various industries including the various fields in the agricultural sector like the crop yield, irrigation, soil content sensing, crop- monitoring, weeding, crop establishment (Kim et al., 2008). Agricultural robots are built in order to deliver high valued application of AI in the mentioned sector. With the global population soaring, the agricultural sector is facing a crisis, but AI has the potential to deliver much-needed solutions. AI-based technological solutions have enabled the farmers to produce more output with less input and even improved the quality of output, also ensuring faster go-to-market for the yielded crops. By 2020, farmers will be using 75 million connected devices. By 2050, the average farm is expected to generate an average of 4.1 million data points per day. The various ways in which AI has contributed to the agricultural sector are as follows:

• Image recognition and perception

Lee et al. (2017) said that in recent years, an increasing interest has been seen in autonomous UAVs and their applications including recognition and surveillance, human body detection and geolocalization, search and rescue, forest fire detection (Bhaskaranand and Gibson, 2011; Doherty and Rudol, 2007; Tomic et al., 2012; Merino et al., 2006). Because of their versatility as well as amazing imaging technology which covers from delivery to photography, the ability to be piloted with a remote controller, and the devices being dexterous in the air which enables us to do a lot with these devices, drones or UAVs are becoming increasingly popular to reach great heights and distances and carrying out several applications.

• Skills and workforce

Panpatte (2018) said that artificial intelligence makes it possible for farmers to assemble large amounts of data from the government as well as public websites, analyze all of it and provide farmers with solutions to many ambiguous issues as well as provide us with a smarter way of irrigation which results in higher yield to the farmers. Due to artificial intelligence, farming will be found to be a mix of technological as well as biological skills in the near future which will not only serve as a better outcome in the matter of quality for all the farmers but also minimize their losses and workloads. The UN states that, by 2050, 2/3rd of the world's population will be living in urban areas which raises a need to lessen the burden on the farmers. AI in agriculture can be applied which would automate several processes, reduce risks and provide farmers with comparatively easy and efficient farming.

• Maximize the output

Ferguson et al. (1991) said in their work that Variety selection and seed quality set the maximum performance level for all plants. The emerging technologies have helped the best selection of the crops and even have improved the selection of hybrid seed choices which are best suited for farmers' needs. It has been implemented by understanding how the seeds react to various weather conditions and different soil types. By collecting this information, the chances of plant diseases are reduced. Now we are able to meet the market trends, yearly outcomes, and consumer needs, thus farmers are efficiently able to maximize the return on crops.

• Chatbots for farmers
• Chatbots are nothing but conversational virtual assistants who automate interactions with end users. Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, along with machine learning techniques have enabled us to understand natural language and interact with users in a more personalized way. They are mainly equipped for retail, travel, media, and agriculture. They have used this facility by assisting the farmers to receive answers to their unanswered questions, giving advice to them, and providing various recommendations also.