Enhancing Agricultural Productivity: A Machine Learning Approach to Crop Recommendations

Abstract Agriculture constitutes the foundational pillar of the global economy, engaging a substantial segment of the workforce and making a considerable contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, agricultural productivity faces numerous challenges, including varying climatic conditions, soil types, and limited access to modern farming practices. Developing intelligent agricultural systems becomes imperative to address these challenges and enhance agricultural productivity. Therefore, this paper aims to present a Machine Learning (ML) based crop recommendation system tailored for the farming landscape. The proposed system utilizes historical data on climatic conditions, soil properties, crop yields, and farmer preferences to provide personalized crop recommendations. The goal of this study is to appraise the efficacy of nine distinct ML models—Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Bagging (BG), AdaBoost (AB), Gradient Boosting (GB), and Extra Trees (ET) to generate practical recommendations for crop selection. Numerous preprocessing methods are employed to cleanse and normalize the data, thereby ensuring its appropriateness for model training. The ML models are trained using historical data sets, including temperature, rainfall, humidity, soil pH, and nutrient levels, where crop yields are correlated with environmental and agronomic factors. The models undergo fine-tuning through methods such as cross-validation to enhance their performance and ensure robustness. Among those models, Radom Forest has achieved the highest accuracy (99.31%). The proposed Machine Learning-based crop recommendation system offers a promising approach to addressing the challenges faced by the farmers. By leveraging advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence techniques, the system empowers farmers with timely and personalized recommendations, ultimately leading to improved agricultural productivity, food security, and economic prosperity.