A Fully Automated Crop Disease Monitoring and Management System Based on IoT: IoT-Based Disease Identification for Banana Leaf

Introduction

The agriculture sector plays a noteworthy role in the development of the country’s economy as such, it provides large-scale employment opportunities to people in countries like India, Colombia, USA, China, Brazil, etc. So, the growth of the agricultural sector is necessary for the development of the economic condition of a country. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has reported that the world has to produce 70 percent more food in 2050 than it produced in 2006 to meet out the food demands of the growing population across the world. With the advent of the advanced technologies in both the agricultural industry and, information and communication technology, human society can produce enough food to meet the demand of more than 7 billion people. However, there exists a threaten to food security by a number of factors including climate change (Harvy et al., 2014), the decline in pollinators (Report of the Plenary of the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity Ecosystem and Services on the work of its fourth session, 2016), plant diseases (Sanchez & Swaminathan, 2005), and some other factors. Plant diseases are not only a threat to food security at the global level but also cause disastrous for smallholder farmers whose livelihoods rely on healthy crops. In the developing countries like India, more than 80 percent of the agricultural production is generated by smallholder farmers (Strange & Scott, 2005), and a report suggests that there is a loss of more than 50% in yield due to pests and diseases (Tai et al., 2014). Moreover, a study reveals that around 50% of the people live in smallholder farming households making smallholder farmers as a group, that is, particularly vulnerable to pathogen-derived disruptions in food supply (UNEP, 2013). So, this is the right time to improve productivity and enhance the quality of the agricultural products, unless otherwise, the people will face food scarcity in the future across the world. But, unfortunately, the farmers face a lot of difficulties in day-to-day crop monitoring and management system like more use of pesticide and fertilizer, disturbance of insects, some types of plant diseases, food preservation, rainfall water scarcity, and so on. Particularly, nowadays, varieties of diseases attack crops so that it creates a huge amount of loss in yield and the farmers have to spend more money on curing the attack. Moreover, many farmers still use the traditional method of farming, which results in low yield; it could also be one of the main factors for the low yield.

To assist the farmers, that is, minimize the expenses and maximize the yield, the precision agriculture (PA) was formed in1929 in Illinois, USA. The PA adopts a management strategy that uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to bring data from multiple sources to make a decision associated with the increase of crop production. The PA has been developed not only in countries like the USA, European Union, and Australia where the average farm sizes are relatively large, but also in Japan, China, and Korea where average farm sizes are relatively small. Since the mid-1990s the PA concept has been widely used in research by academic groups and the agricultural companies by adopting ICT with the use of commercially available sensors, wireless sensors networks, controllers, software programs, and so on. The Scope of the PA has become wide and it has introduced new terms, such as precision citrus farming, precision horticulture, precision viticulture, precision livestock farming, and precision aquaculture, etc. For effective use of these new aspects of PA, recent technological advancements in data communication and data analysis, such as ICT, IoT, Pattern Recognition, Big Data Analytics, and Data Mining techniques, have been fused.