AI for Precision Fertilizer and Pesticide Application: An Integrated Real-Time Deep Learning and IoT-Driven Field Management System

Abstract

Abstract Blanket-rate agrochemical scheduling — a practice wherein the same quantity of fertilizer or pesticide is spread uniformly across an entire field irrespective of spatial or temporal crop need — persists as the dominant farm management paradigm across rural India and large parts of South Asia. This approach generates cascading inefficiencies: excess nitrogen drains into waterways, off-target pesticide deposits devastate pollinators, input costs erode thin profit margins, and wide-scale greenhouse gas release from soil microbial activity accelerates climate change. The study documented here addresses this challenge through a purpose-built, four-layer intelligent field management platform. The platform ingests continuous data from drone-mounted multispectral cameras, in-field IoT soil probes, a wireless weather station, and cloud-sourced Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, then passes these inputs through a cascaded AI inference stack. A fine-tuned YOLOv8-L network performs real-time pest and foliar disease localisation; a ResNet-50 backbone quantifies canopy health across five stress gradients; a two-layer stacked LSTM projects short-horizon yield trajectories; and a Deep Q-Network autonomously plans drone spray routes weighted by field-specific prescription maps. Field validation spanned two consecutive growing seasons (Rabi 2022–23 and Kharif 2023–24) across six georeferenced plots covering 4.8 ha at Baramati, Maharashtra. Outcome metrics recorded during head-to-head comparison with conventional practice included a disease detection score of 95.6% mAP, a 47.3% reduction in total nitrogen applied, a 38.1% decrease in pesticide volume, and a 22.4% uplift in harvested grain weight. Together, these field-verified numbers substantiate the operational readiness of integrated AI precision agriculture for smallholder deployment.

Code and data availability

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