Bangladesh's success in agriculture is enviable. Bangladesh is now an example in the world in producing food grains even in the face of floods, drought, salinity and hostile nature due to climate change including shrinking agricultural land, population growth. Bangladesh is gradually progressing behind the world average production of rice, wheat and corn. The world has recovered from Corona. As a result, now is the time to build a smart Bangladesh in agriculture.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is called artificial intelligence in Bengali which is a branch of computer science.
Fortunately, both agriculture and artificial intelligence are vast fields. There are many branches of artificial intelligence. Among them, I think the most practical work is being done in two branches these days. One is computer vision; I can say mechanical vision in Bengali. Another is prediction. I will limit the discussion to the mechanical point of view. There are many branches of agriculture; however, I will limit this write up only touching on crops; how to improve crop yield, soil health and herbicide resistance through artificial intelligence technology. The application of artificial intelligence in the field of agriculture is also increasing at a very fast pace. Notable among these are crop modelling, decision support systems, precision agriculture. Good and bad seeds can be separated. Sowing thousands of seeds a day or transplanting seedlings using mechanical vision is a very common daily occurrence in commercial agriculture. You can quickly choose the appropriate seedlings. By applying mechanical vision, it is possible to easily separate ripe fruits suitable for planting. A mobile phone app can also detect ripe fruit. In the computer simulation model, it can be predicted in advance how much fertilizer, water, etc., at what time and how much will be used, how much yield will be obtained.
Fertilizers and seeds can be applied and sown by creating the fertility gradient of the land using satellites or drones. Using micro-controlled drip, sprinkler or rain gun technology to water / irrigate land etc.
The ideal characteristic of artificial intelligence is the ability to reason and adopt processes that have the best chance of achieving certain goals. A subset of artificial intelligence is machine which refers to the idea that computer programmes can automatically learn and adapt to new data without assistance from humans.
In today's world, there is hardly any computer technology dependent field where artificial intelligence is not being used in the fields where artificial intelligence is being used - in modern agriculture, diagnosis in medicine, share trading in stock market, control of robot activities, and solution of legal problems, aviation, and war field � everywhere it is in operation. It is used in management, in banking operations, in design, for cyber security, in video games, in smart cars, to filter your mail spam, to price your ride on Uber, in data centre management, in genomics/sequencing.
Today, artificial intelligence has become part of the immense potential in education and modern agriculture. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has also started to be used in agriculture. In continuation of this, a group of young IT engineers and agriculturists from aMedina Tech private organization in Bangladesh have already released the groundbreaking mobile app "Dr Chashi" on the Google Play Store using AI technology in agriculture.
Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) has launched a mobile app called 'Rice Solution' (sensor based rice pest management) to identify rice pests which is able to identify the disease by looking at the picture of the affected rice plant from the paddy field. On January 2, 2023, Monday - The Agriculture Minister inaugurated the mobile apps as the chief guest at the six-day annual research review workshop held at BRI in Gazipur.
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University of Bangladesh Government is already going to start the project called "E-Village" in order to develop the agricultural sector. It can take various information from the crop or vegetable field through the sensor and deliver it to the farmer through the mobile app. Through this project called �e-Village�, the health of the soil of the crop land is known, the crop is constantly monitored and the disease is known immediately from the experts, and the farmer can use the information from the app to reduce his production cost to the maximum. The project is financially supported by the Chinese Embassy.
If AI is customized with drones and artificial intelligence is integrated, the drone flying over the crop field is able to inform the overall condition of the area in the future, such as: measuring the moisture of the crop field, determining the presence of elements in the crop, designing crop planting.
Now is the time to make agriculture cost-effective, sustainable, and smart technology based through Smart Farming / Digitalization in Agriculture, i.e. expanding Artificial Intelligence (AI technology) in agriculture.
- Shamiran Biswas, Lead-Agriculturist, Medina Tech Limited
�The application of artificial intelligence in the field of agriculture is also increasing at a very fast pace. Notable among these are crop modelling, decision support systems, precision agriculture.�
