Recommendation Systems in Smart Agriculture: Pathway to a well-designed system

Rapid growth in global food demand and production has led to a shift from traditional agriculture to smart one. It seems crucial for both governments and farmers to adopt technologies in agriculture to meet the current challenges of providing large quantities of high-quality foods and making the most of natural resources. The advent of recommendation systems in smart agriculture has gained attention in recent years as a solution for increasing yield production by suggesting suitable crops regarding the agricultural parameters. Recommendation systems also increase sustainability with better consideration of necessary nutrients and yield monitoring and lead to the proper procedure to prevent accountable production wastes. The aim of this paper is to review recent works on recommendation systems in smart agriculture to propose a conceptual model on the way to design a proper recommendation system. We categorized previous efforts on recommendation systems in four domains of weather conditions, pests and diseases, crop plants, and soil characteristics. The proposed pathway brings awareness and also a holistic view for the managers and policymakers from existing technologies, challenges, and techniques regarding designing a proper recommendation system in smart agriculture which helps in the transition from traditional routines into the smart era of agricultural practices.