Precision Agriculture: Enhanced Vision for farmers in Nepal

The demand for agriculture to feed a larger and more urbanized population will continue to grow, placing additional pressure on available land and other natural resources. Keeping global food production abreast of human population growth would involve the implementation of the sustainability approach towards the very vital aspects of ecosystem services. Agricultural sustainability can be achieved by the utilization, monitoring, and implementation of techniques of farming which would increase the production of crops to meet demands of a growing population while at the same time it would conserve and protect the environment and its natural sources.

In this article, I would like to give you an overview of the precision agriculture technique implemented in the western lowlands of Nepal, in the vicinity of the Lumbini area, Rupandehi District of Province No. 5 in Nepal. Figures 1 and 2 provide a visual overview of the study area. The most dominant crop during the data acquisition was Rice, which was distributed in an area of 0.827 Hectare. The minimum and maximum elevation of the farmland were 129.5 m and 136.7 m respectively. We performed the survey using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (DJI Phantom 4) on a fine sunny day using the inbuilt RGB sensor. RGB sensor has 3 bands of the spectrum that can be used in the calculation of Vegetation Indices.

A Vegetation Index (VI) is a spectral calculation that is done between two or more bands of the source data designed to enhance the contribution of vegetation properties and allow for comparisons of photosynthetic activity across your area of interest. Most plants are green because they contain a pigment called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll fuels the process of Photosynthesis in living plants by allowing them to absorb energy from light. Chlorophyll absorbs light in the red (long wavelength) and the blue (short wavelength) regions of the visible light spectrum. Greenlight is not absorbed but reflected, making the plant appear green.

For calculation of plant health values with RGB data, the greenness of the vegetation is the most revealing property of the plant. Therefore, each Vegetation Index for Visual data relies heavily on the greenness seen in the source imagery. We computed three vegetation indices such as: Visual NDVI- Visual Normalized Difference Vegetation Index GLI- Green Leaf Index VARI- Visual Atmospheric Resistance Index

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of advantages of precision agriculture, such as: provides a farmer with valuable insights into their farmland improves farm productivity and thus maximizes profit helps monitors crop growth, weeds and possible diseases. supports yield prediction and irrigation management growth monitoring; and so on…