Yesterday I came across this news and was deeply saddened by the fact that so many farmers are committing suicides and we're not able to help them out. So, I asked this question to myself (and my friends), that what can we, as Engineers, do to solve this problem. This repo is a log of fruitful discussions I had about this and will hopefully lead to something substantial, someday :).
Note 1: I understand that to solve this problem, at scale, Govt. needs to do lots of things, and we have to believe/accept that the Govt. is doing what it can do (otherwise we should be in politics), So, we can't crib about Govt./Country/Population etc (atleast on this repo). These are constraints to our optimization problem!
Note 2: Contributions of Ideas/References/Links to Agricultural-Datasets/<Anything else which you feel might be useful for engineers working in agricultural domain> etc are most welcome on this repo.
| Organization/Dataset | Description of dataset | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Image-Net Dataset | Images of various plants (trees, vegetables, flowers) | http://image-net.org/explore?wnid=n07707451 |
| ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) | Images that allow object localization and detection | http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2017/#det |
| University of Arkansas, Plants Dataset | Herbicide injury image database | https://plants.uaex.edu/herbicide/ http://www.uaex.edu/yard-garden/resource-library/diseases/ |
| EPFL, Plant Village Dataset | Images of various crops and their diseases | https://www.plantvillage.org/en/crops |
| Leafsnap Dataset | Leaves from 185 tree species from the Northeastern United States. | http://leafsnap.com/dataset/ |
| LifeCLEF Dataset | Identity, geographic distribution and uses of plants | http://www.imageclef.org/2014/lifeclef/plant |
| PASCAL Visual Object Classes Dataset | Images of various animals (birds, cats,horses, sheep etc. cows, dogs, | http://host.robots.ox.ac.uk/pascal/VOC/ |
| Africa Soil Information Service (AFSIS) dataset | Continent-wide digital soil maps for Sub-Saharan Africa | http://africasoils.net/services/data/ |
| UC Merced Land Use Dataset | A 21 class land use image dataset | http://vision.ucmerced.edu/datasets/landuse.html |
| MalayaKew Dataset | Scan-like images of leaves from 44 species classes. | http://web.fsktm.um.edu.my/~cschan/downloads_MKLeaf_dataset.html |
| Crop/Weed Field Image Dataset | Field images, vegetation segmentation masks and crop/weed plant type annotations. | https://github.com/cwfid/dataset https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/58a0/9b1351ddb447e6abdede7233a4794d538155.pdf |
| University of Bonn Photogrammetry, IGG | Sugar beets dataset for plant classification as well as localization and mapping. | http://www.ipb.uni-bonn.de/data/ |
| Flavia leaf dataset | Leaf images of 32 plants. | http://flavia.sourceforge.net/ |
| Syngenta Crop Challenge 2017 | 2,267 of corn hybrids in 2,122 of locations between 2008 and 2016, together with weather and soil conditions | https://www.ideaconnection.com/syngenta-crop-challenge/challenge.php |
Reference:
Research papers:
- https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1807/1807.11809.pdf
- Deep Learning in agriculture
- Research Articles
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A tool/platform which can raise funds in case of drought/when farmers are in dire need of money - because of which they eventually commit suicide - like paytm etc do in case of floods, earthquake or any other natural calamity. We need to build something like this especially for farmers, we need to have a mediator, backed by technology, which can directly connect needy farmers and those who can donate. We need an organization to maintain this platform's credibility and to run it!
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Generate passive sources of income, so that agriculture is not the only source of income for farmers. They should be able to participate remotely in that activity. One such activity - is dataset collection - but this isn't sustainable. Because of boom in ML and AI, dataset collection has become a business activity, and it can be done remotely. Something similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk but should not require heavy capital initially.
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Provide Better weather predictions knowledge to farmers (maybe through a mobile app) and also help them with which crops should they grow in that particular season, keeping in mind the weather conditions. So they can plan crops according to weather( how much water it needs, in rain dependent areas) and avoid losses due to unfavourable weather.
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A Website/Mobile app that can work as a tool where farmers can learn, network with other farmers. Where new techniques can be taught to farmers. But as most farmers don't have access to net or mobile phones , gram panchayats can be involved for better implementation.
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Developing a platform where we can directly connect farmers to consumers. It will increase farmers income and consumers will get product on cheaper price.