2011 Second International Conference on Emerging Applications of Information Technology

Agriculture Intelligence: An Emerging Technology for Farmer Community

Tejas Ghadiyali
Udhna Citizen Co-op.Bank Commerce Collge

Kalpesh Lad
Shrimad Rajchandra Inst.of Mngt & Comp.Appl.

Bankim Patel
Shrimad Rajchandra Inst.of Mngt & Comp.Appl.

Surat, INDIA tejas_ghadiyali@rediffmail.com

Bardoli, INDIA

Bardoli, INDIA

kalpesh.lad@srimca.edu.in

bankim_patel@srimca.edu.in

Abstract In this paper, authors have introduced the new terminology Agriculture Intelligence for agricultural business. Authors have shown the current trends of the Agri-Business concept using Intelligence, limitation of current Information Technology in the domain of agriculture and try to overcome the same. Authors have also proposed architecture model. Such architecture takes care of data availability from various resources and provides solution by applying agriculture intelligence. KeywordsAgriculture Intelligent tools Intelligence; Data Warehouse;

by interfacing education, research and extension initiatives complemented with efficient and effective institutional, infrastructure and policy support, for ensuring livelihood security. II. SIGNIFICANCE OF AGRICULTURE INTELLIGENCE In a recent NSSO survey, it has been revealed that nearly 40% of farmers would like to quit farming, if they have the option to do so [2]. Few reasons for such situation are, exponential increasing land cost, high operational cost, low profitability, lake of technological literacy and awareness, insufficient facilities like cold storage, marketing, logistics etc. Development Research Group under titled Agricultural Growth in India since 1991 noted that, shrinking farm size has been one of the reasons for a slowdown in the growth. Smaller holding-size makes it more difficult for the majority of Indian farms to access new technology and adopt more efficient forms of production. Further the average farm size is becoming smaller and smaller year after year and the cost-risk-return structure of farming is becoming adverse [1, 20]. As agriculture plays a crucial role in Indian economy and a farmer is a base bone of the agriculture sector, authors reveal that Agriculture Intelligence is more significance to the farmer. To provide good services to farmers, there are several web services like Agriculture Marketing Research & Information Network, AGMARKNET, IASL, Precision Agriculture etc. [3, 8, 13, 14, 21, 22]. However, majority of them only provides the commodity wise price tagging. The main drawback of such services is that, they do not provide the user friendly information like Price Analysis, Distance between Mandis etc. to stake holders. However, agriculture sector demands some additional intelligent process for the betterment of the agriculture product and its stake-holder. A new thrust in Biotechnology, Nanotechnology and Information & Communication Technology (ICT) together may contribute to resolve key concerns related to agriculture. The key concerns are access to information, share knowledge and skills, food safety and control of plant diseases, ensuring environmental safety and sustainable use of natural resources.
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I. INTRODUCTION Agriculture has played a crucial role in the development of the Indian economy. It accounts for about 19% of GDP [4]. This sector contributes close to a quarter of Indias National Income and work force engaged in agriculture is about 60% [15]. About 70% of the population lives in rural areas and majority of them depend upon agriculture as their primary source of income [15, 14]. Green revolution initiated from 1965 onwards in India. The increased use of fertilizers and irrigation, known collectively as the Green Revolution, increased production needed to make India selfsufficient in food grains. As per World Bank report of 2008 on India Country Overview 2008, current agricultural practices are neither economically nor environmentally sustainable. Further, yields for many agricultural commodities are low [19]. The farmers also get low price for their yield because of several reasons like limited number of Mandis, lack of price information, lack of technological knowledge etc. [19]. Web portals are also available to assist famers in a limited way. But the response on the part of the research, innovation and extension of sectors should be linked to agriculture to generate technologies / tools that will make it possible to measure the variability that occurs naturally in fields, so that inputs can be applied in the right amount, at the right place and at the right time to increase farmers productivity and there by profitability. Indian Council of Agriculture Research working in this direction to promote sustainable growth and development of Indian agriculture
978-0-7695-4329-1/11 $26.00 2011 IEEE DOI 10.1109/EAIT.2011.36

Based on above discussion, Authors have considered the following objectives: To enhance the technological diversity overall and explore the real utilisation of Intelligence in agriculture sector. To provide strategic and tactic information to the farmer like targeted marketing and sales strategies, forecasting for agricultural production and current agriculture market scenario at right time to increase the net profitability. To gather information on the trends in the marketplace and come up with innovative products or services in anticipation of farmer's and other stake holders changing demands. To provide user friendly environment to fetch the knowledge about agriculture sector. III. TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF AGRICULTURE IN INDIA Traditional farming practice has evolved over the years. The important evolution in the field of agriculture is related with the Agricultural Biotechnology with respect to the Hybrid Seeds, Plant Extraction, Biopesticides and Biofertilizers [7]. ICT can be used to a great extent in proper distribution of seeds, products to the markets, price monitoring and fertilizer distribution etc. Large irrigation projects which are critical to development in agriculture sector are being closely monitored on an online basis through the use of IT [9]. Another important technological evolution in the field of agriculture in India is e-Choupal. It is a business platform consisting of a set of organizational subsystems and interfaces connecting farmers to global markets [24]. It provides link directly with rural farmers via the Internet for procurement of agricultural products. However, such technological evolution in agriculture systems, particularly in India, suffers from following limitations. IT facilities provider is mainly focus on agri-business traders and agri-product market, in which direct involvement of the farmer is rare. The operation of the e-trading portal or other IT facility providers tool requires the knowledge of the computer literacy which again one of the issue for the most of the farmer community in India. Multi-Lingual feature is also required, which is hardly provided by the current IT systems. Bi-lingual environment provided only in some of the Indian language only. Still we do not get the strategic information like Price Analysis, Location-distance analysis and demand and supply ratio analysis. IV. AGRICULTURE INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM

A. Agriculture Intelligence Based on above discussion, authors have come-up with new terminology of Agriculture Intelligence in this paper. Authors have defined it as Agriculture Intelligence is neither a product nor a system. It is an architecture, which is a collection of integrated operational as well as decisionsupport components, technologies and databases that provides the agriculture community easy access to agricultural knowledge. Using the Agriculture Intelligence concept such as Dashboard in Business Intelligence, the farmer can have the latest information for commodities in which he is mainly interested. Agriculture Intelligence significantly requires in the domain of agriculture to avail the gain of different aspects, which are as follows: To avoid Guess Work: It can help to develop a more consistent, data-based decision making process for agriculture community, which can produce better results than making agriculture decisions by guesswork. To improve performance: It is well-designed and properly integrated into a farms processes and decision-making process, it helps to improve a farm and farm product performance. To know about Customer: It enables to gather information on the trends in the marketplace and come up with innovative products or services in anticipation of customer's changing demands. To know about Competitors Market and enhance profitability: It can help farmers to be better informed about actions that competitors are taking in the same product. It also helps farmer to avail the information for the competitive market position, optimal rate for selected vegetable product in the form in Dashboard to enhance the agri-trade profitability. B. Agriculture Intelligence Architecture Authors have proposed an architectural model as shown in figure-1. At time of designing of Agriculture Intelligence Architecture, authors have considered the basic features and needs of the stake holders. Authors have also considered the reachability and availability of the internet in Indian villages and mandis. The above proposed model basically classified in to four components 1) Data Source, 2) Data Warehouse Process, 3) Agriculture Intelligence Tools and 4) Stake Holders. In first component of Data Source, authors have various data elements of the agriculture sector, which provides the major input to the system. Actually it creates the base of the second component Data Warehouse Process. Second component Data Warehouse Process, which basically performs pre-processing and then stores the data for long time purpose and takes care of the data structure in the form of Data Cubes and sub-elements as Data Mart. The third component Agriculture Intelligence Tools, is the heart of the

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data and linked in to agriculture data storage for further processing. 2) Data Warehouse Process A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and nonvolatile collection of data in support of decision making process [12]. As shown in figure-1, the data from the data sources transfer to an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) routine. The primary responsibilities of the ETL process includes extracting data from one or more input sources, cleaning and transforming the extracted data as necessary as well as loading the data into the warehouse. Authors have remove noise in data using different preprocessing techniques like Data Cleaning, Data Integration, Data Transformation and Data Reduction. only required data will be further use for data mining. Data Cleaning Techniques aims to remove noisy and inconsistent as well as incomplete data from the input data sources. Data Integration aims at merging data from multiple sources and there by eliminate duplication. Data Transformation is a process of converting the original input data into alternate format that are suitable for further mining. Data Reduction aims at eliminating irrelevant and redundant attributes, and employs encoding mechanism to reduce the data set size. Data warehouse processes also manages the Metadata in the form of Data Cubes. Here the main functionality of such Data Cubes is to generate and maintain the data structure required at the time of data warehouse processing. Such Metadata gives us a better understanding of nature of data contained in the data warehouse. A Data Mart is an element in the data warehouse process. It is Small, Single-Subject data warehouse subset that provides decision support like Price Analysis for a particular commodity, highest demand of particular Agri-Product in the particular area etc. 3) Agriculture Intelligence Tools The main purpose of the Agriculture Intelligence tools over here is to extract the data from the data resides in the Data Mart and Data warehouse and generate knowledge. These intelligence tools use different appropriate Data Mining techniques to extract and/or discover the knowledge from the data repository. According to a widely accepted definition, knowledge generation or discovery refers to the non-trivial process of identifying valid and understandable/interpretable structure in the data [21]. Knowledge Extraction process mainly accepts the results from data analysis and classification phase and apply knowledge acquisition algorithms like, Neural Network, Decision Trees and Genetic Algorithms. Next prediction process performs the forecast for the agriculture business outcomes and predicts the future behavior. The same knowledge can be published in the form of the summarised meaningful manner in the form of Dashboard, so that the outsider beneficiary can avail the benefit of the same. The agriculture intelligence tools are mainly use as a knowledge discovery tool. They are interactive, iterative procedure that attempts to extract structured as well as

FIG-1 AGRICULTURE INTELLIGENCE ARCHITECTURE MODEL proposed architecture. It captures the data from the Data Warehouse and using proper data mining techniques, it transforms the accepted data in the form of meaningful knowledge to the Dashboard. The fourth and last component Stake Holders is the real beneficiary of this extracted knowledge through dashboard. In this proposed model, each section has its own functionality and output of the early component will be the useful as input for the next component. Detail discussions about above four components are as below. 1) Data Source In this component the source of data is from the various external environments. The main sources of data are Agriculture Market, Mandis and web-services provided by the Government and NGO agencies. Such data transfer through pre-processing stage (Extract, Transform and Load) to the data storage location. The Agriculture Market mainly provides the data related to the daily trading, upwards and downwards in demands of the agriculture product. Mandis is a society made by group of farmers. In this Mandis each farmer is the member and is eligible for trading with the Mandis with special trade discount policy. So such Mandis also trade for the agriculture product and declare the price on daily basis. As small to medium farmers are nearer to Mandis compare to Agriculture Market, such input impacts huge for them. Agriculture Web Services is the external agency in the form of government or non-government organisation. Our proposed model transfers the data from such web-services through pre-processing stage (Extract, Transform and Load) to the data storage location. As such various Web Services provides data on daily basis in the difference form for different purpose, it is very difficult for farmer community to analyze such data. Proposed model integrates all such

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unstructured information from several data sources and generates potentially useful knowledge. Through such tool we can perform the product behavior analysis, sales strategies and risk analysis for agriculture product which resultant in to maximize farmers strengths and shorten marketing efforts for agricultural product. And in this way we can use this agriculture intelligence tool as a synonym for competitive intelligence. 4) Stake Holders In agriculture sectors, the main stockholders of proposed model are Farmers, Mandis and Agriculture Market itself. These beneficiaries used the extracted knowledge for future prediction of agriculture products. Such generated knowledge also helps farmer communities to create some rules on the base of which they can trade in the near future to make profit. The Mandis can have the same information and can distribute such information among the member of the society for their information and to know the current scenario in the market. Mandis manager can also check the price analysis for the profit making trading of the mandis. The agriculture Mandis can also use such generated knowledge for the well-being their members. The Mandis can arrange frequent meetings and spread the information to the person who is an-aware about the prediction done by the agriculture intelligence architecture. In the Agriculture Market, the whole sell dealer of the agriculture market can watch the whole market knowledge or the particular seasonal product or product analysis per day per agriculture product and trade accordingly to enhance the trading profit. So this architecture will provides the transparent system to the entire beneficiary, so that one cannot cheat to others and here the extracted knowledge from the proposed architecture will be the base at the time of transaction done between any agriculture stake holders. V. CONCLUSION In this paper, authors have introduced the new terminology Agriculture Intelligence. Here focused has been also given on current scenario of ICT in the domain of Agriculture product, business and the limitation of the same. Proposed Agriculture Intelligence architecture helps all stake holders, particularly to farmer community in Dashboard form to enhance their profitability. REFERENCES
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