Formulation of a crop information retrieval system based on biophysical and weather parameters

Abstract

newlineAgriculture being one of the prime contributors to India s Gross Domestic Product needs newlineconstant monitoring so that the bearing on the economy can be better judged. Periodic monitoring newlineof Indian agriculture is an essential task. The monitoring would greatly help to understand the newlinevariations of crop phenologies, the progress of cropped area and the vagaries of the monsoon newlinewhich have a significant impact on the agricultural scenario of India. Such a monitoring could newlinehelp in timely interventions in the agrarian setup. Crop statistic in India is obtained from newlinemultifarious sources. However, most of the methods give a broad statistic of the crop sown and newlinethe expected output. These methods are based on econometric modeling, ground based surveys or newlinesometimes by market driven indices. Monitoring of agriculture using remote sensing data is newlinebeing done for more than two decades. In India, an operational remote sensing based crop newlineacreage and production estimation is being carried out under the Forecasting Agricultural output newlineusing Space, Agrometeorology and Land based observations (FASAL) program. Under this newlineprogram district, state and national level crop in-season multiple estimates are made regularly. newlineThese estimates are released much before the harvest of the crop in order to facilitate the policy newlineplanners. The agricultural scenario would change from year to year based on the monsoon, the newlinesocio-economic conditions and the government policies. For a given season, any change in the newlinecropping pattern or sowing operations need to be known in advance for remedial measures to be newlinetaken up. For retrieving information pertaining to the crop of a season, various information layers newlineneed to be synthesized and appropriate queries need to be generated. Towards this end, an newlineappropriate information system which could help in monitoring Indian agriculture will be an newlineasset. Such a system would require large amounts of data pertaining to weather parameters like newlinerainfall and temperature; soil parameters, crop parameters l