Crop Recommender System Using Machine Learning Approach

Agriculture and its allied sectors are undoubtedly the largest providers of livelihoods in rural India. The agriculture sector is also a significant contributor factor to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Blessing to the country is the overwhelming size of the agricultural sector. However, regrettable is the yield per hectare of crops in comparison to international standards. This is one of the possible causes for a higher suicide rate among marginal farmers in India. This paper proposes a viable and user-friendly yield prediction system for the farmers. The proposed system provides connectivity to farmers via a mobile application. GPS helps to identify the user location. The user provides the area & soil type as input. Machine learning algorithms allow choosing the most profitable crop list or predicting the crop yield for a user-selected crop. To predict the crop yield, selected Machine Learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Random Forest (RF), Multivariate Linear Regression (MLR), and K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) are used. Among them, the Random Forest showed the best results with 95% accuracy. Additionally, the system also suggests the best time to use the fertilizers to boost up the yield.