Internet of Things (IoT) Assisted Context Aware Fertilizer Recommendation

An accurate amount of fertilizer according to the real-time context is the basis of precision agriculture in terms of sustainability and profitability. Many fertilizers recommendation systems are proposed without considering the real-time context in terms of soil fertility level, crop type, and soil type. The major obstacle in developing the real-time context-aware fertilizer recommendation system is related to the complexity associated with the real-time mapping of soil fertility. Furthermore, the existing methods of determining the real-time soil fertility levels for the recommendation of fertilizer are costly, time-consuming, and laborious. Therefore, to tackle this issue, we propose a machine learning-based fertilizer recommendation methodology according to the real-time soil fertility context captured through the Internet of Things (IoT) assisted soil fertility mapping to improve the accuracy of the fertilizer recommendation system. For real-time soil fertility mapping, an IoT architecture is also proposed to support context-aware fertilizer recommendations. The proposed solution is practically implemented in real crop fields to assess the accuracies of IoT-assisted fertility mapping. The accuracy of IoT-assisted fertility mapping is assessed by comparing the proposed solution with the standard soil chemical analysis method in terms of observing Nitrogen (N), Phosphorous (P), and Potassium (K). The results reveal that the observations by both methods are in line with a mean difference of 0.34, 0.36, and −0.13 for N, P, and K observations, respectively. The context-aware fertilizer recommendation is implemented with the Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) machine learning models to assess the performance of these machine learning models. The evaluation of the proposed solution reveals that the GNB model is more accurate as compared to the machine learning models evaluated, with accuracies of 96% and 94% from training and testing datasets, respectively.