Deep Learning and Internet of things Integrated Farming during COVID-19 in India

Abstract
Background and Aim of Study: Agriculture is a central pillar of the Indian economy. Agriculture is largest livelihood provider in India. Agriculture employed more than 50% of the Indian work force and contributed 17–18% to country’s GDP. The on-going health crisis COVID-19 has affected all walks of life including agriculture. Indian agriculture sector has been facing several challenges because of Covid-19 restrictions. Outbreak of corona virus in India and the consequent lockdown, unfortunately, also coincided with the country’s peak harvesting time of a variety of crops of the season. Across India, a massive agricultural crisis is due to COVID-19 shutdown. The aim of the study: to use deep learning and Internet of things (IoT) technologies as a tool to handle many problems in agriculture domain such as lack of irrigation infrastructure, market infrastructure and transport infrastructure etc. Materials and Methods: We have discussed various problems faced by Indian farmers during this lockdown and various steps taken by Indian government to tackle this global pandemic of COVID-19. This study introduced possible solutions for improvement by using deep learning based Internet of things ecosystem that helps in gathering information from farmers such location-based information, crop health information and environmental constraints. Results: We proposed an IoT based agriculture framework to monitor and analyse crop health by using deep learning remotely. This framework promotes a fast development of agricultural modernization, realize smart agriculture and effectively solve the problems concerning agriculture. Our research findings indicate that deep learning provides high accuracy, outperforming existing commonly used data processing techniques. Conclusions: Data-driven agriculture, with the help of internet of things and deep learning techniques, sets the grounds for the sustainable agriculture of the future. This study proposed the future advanced farm management systems through deep learning and IoT technologies to solve various problem faced by Indian farmers during COVID-19 pandemic.