Machine Learning Applications for Precision Agriculture: A Comprehensive Review

Agriculture plays a vital role in the economic growth of any country. With the increase of population, frequent changes in climatic conditions and limited resources, it becomes a challenging task to fulfil the food requirement of the present population. Precision agriculture also known as smart farming have emerged as an innovative tool to address current challenges in agricultural sustainability. The mechanism that drives this cutting edge technology is machine learning (ML). It gives the machine ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. ML together with IoT (Internet of Things) enabled farm machinery are key components of the next agriculture revolution. In this article, authors present a systematic review of ML applications in the field of agriculture. The areas that are focused are prediction of soil parameters such as organic carbon and moisture content, crop yield prediction, disease and weed detection in crops and species detection. ML with computer vision are reviewed for the classification of a different set of crop images in order to monitor the crop quality and yield assessment. This approach can be integrated for enhanced livestock production by predicting fertility patterns, diagnosing eating disorders, cattle behaviour based on ML models using data collected by collar sensors, etc. Intelligent irrigation which includes drip irrigation and intelligent harvesting techniques are also reviewed that reduces human labour to a great extent. This article demonstrates how knowledge-based agriculture can improve the sustainable productivity and quality of the product.