Agricure | Devpost

Inspiration

   Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield. — President Dwight D. Eisenhower

We think farming as a job and farmers are pushed off in the society. Farmers are life givers, the give their whole life to feed us, despite their hardwork they only get small profit. When technological advancements came farmers were left out,so we thought how about we use the same technology to revelutionize agricultural field. So we took the most labour intensive and expensive problem ploughing. The majority of farmers in India still use age old farming techniques while the world have shifted to smarter ways. The problem we set out to change was to provide for this deficiency in modern agricultural techniques at minimum cost

What it does

The device we designed will be able to replace manual human labour at a much more efficient and cost effective rate. It can plough lands twice the size of what an average person can, in half the time. In India,we often witness the cultivating land losing its natural quality due to over cultivation. The system we design will have an in-built mechanism that will check the factors of environment like soil moisture, temperature, humidity to ensure if it is capable of supporting the healthy growth of crops. According to the feedback received from soil quality analysis,while ploughing,the device will sprinkle an ample amount of fertilisers and pesticides and mix them with the soil to support the growth of crop.

How we built it

We have to make a perfect design to become cost effective and to distribute the preferred components in the agrigator. Since fields have sunlight available it will be easy to charge the agrigator by solar power making it environment friendly and economical. The agrigator has 4 wheels where the front wheel acts as a drive powered by motors with high torque and less speed to plough the fields. The back wheels provide rigidity and support. We use boundary mapping for the preferred field and run the agrigator using machine learning algorithms. We have to use sensors like gyro , proximity and temperature, humidity, light, moisture etc to account for movement, stability and to consider environmental factors. By sensing these factors the seeds can be deployed,the accurate amount of manure can be deployed. The ploughing metal is high tensile strength alloy for efficient performance.Atlast the agrigator is designed to make it in to a perfect shape. We can control the agrigator using a mobile app.

Challenges we ran into

*Compacting designing of the whole device. Adjusting components of different sizes and reducing the complexity of the design. *Reducing the cost of the entire device. As most of the farmers in India struggles to make a profit from their crop. It is less likely for them to buy expensive devices as they may find it difficult to repay the loan. Hence it is imperative that we find mechanisms to reduce the cost of the device . *Finding funding for this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

*Convincing farmers to switch from old conventional techniques to new technologies that will help them increase their profit margin. *Teaching farmers about the mechanism of using such new technologies . *A single device that can plough and look after fertilisation requirements of the soil and also does a pesticide check.

What we learned

Through our survey, we realised that cost of the device is the main factor that stands between a farmer accepting to use a newer technology. And hence reduction in cost was one of our main focus. Also the land domains and the environmental conditions are different in different part of the country and hence the device should be able to withstand extreme weather condition. An accurate prediction of the amount of fertilisers and pesticides to be used is crucial for the performance and success of the device. Failure of the correct analysis may result in messing up with the soil quality. We learned that implementation of the project is so hard so we have to make a farming community so as to bring more and more farmers closer to share their views and ideas regarding the agrigator and more.

What's next for Agricure

We want all the struggling farmers to be helped by eco friendly agrigator and add more customisable features for preferred areas to decrease the cost more.