Mobile app to identify and manage sucking pest infestation on cotton being developed
City-based Tamil Nadu Agricultural University’s (TNAU) department of agricultural entomology along with Mumbai-based Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence is developing a mobile app that cotton farmers can use to identify and deal with a sucking pest infestation.
According to Wadhwani institute, six million farmers and their families depend on cotton for livelihood and avoidable pest damage often wipes out 50% of their annual crop yield.
According to Wadhwani institute, six million farmers and their families depend on cotton for livelihood and avoidable pest damage often wipes out 50% of their annual crop yield.
“We are focusing on cotton because nearly 50% of the pesticides used in the country, is used on cotton alone,” director of Centre for Plant Protection Studies K Prabakar said.
Being the country’s third largest cash crop, after rice and wheat, 75% of it is grown by small-holder farmers, who struggle to manage pests despite heavy usage of pesticides, principal investigator for the project M Muthuswami said.
The new app will focus on sucking pests mainly leafhoppers, thrips, aphids and whiteflies. “These insects have hundreds of genera and sub species, varieties and types,” professor and head of agricultural entomology N Sathiah said. “The app will be able to detect and recognize any pest belonging to the four insect types in future,” he said.
Being the country’s third largest cash crop, after rice and wheat, 75% of it is grown by small-holder farmers, who struggle to manage pests despite heavy usage of pesticides, principal investigator for the project M Muthuswami said.
The new app will focus on sucking pests mainly leafhoppers, thrips, aphids and whiteflies. “These insects have hundreds of genera and sub species, varieties and types,” professor and head of agricultural entomology N Sathiah said. “The app will be able to detect and recognize any pest belonging to the four insect types in future,” he said.
For this, farmers need to put up yellow sticky traps within their farm and take a picture of the trap catches after a day, by which time a certain number of pests would have stuck on to it.
The app, based on artificial intelligence, will detect which of the sucking pests have infested the crop, based on the number of pests on the trap judge whether their numbers are large enough to require intervention, judge if the crop is in a vulnerable stage and will then automatically tell the farmer how to manage the infestation. “We will feed in information on economic threshold level. So only when the infestation is large enough to affect the output economically, will the app recommend management. If it is a small infestation, the expenditure on pesticide and labour will not justify the outcome,” Sathiah said.
The app should be out for farmers within the next 18 months. On TNAU’s part they are also recruiting seven senior research fellows who will visit three TNAU’s cotton farms in Coimbatore, Sriviliputhur and Perambalur to monitor the pests and click as many pictures of sticky traps with sucking pests as possible and send it to Wadhwani for them to start developing the AI.
“While they want the app to have 20,000 images, we need to send them at least 1 lakh images. So, the app can recognize insects from a picture clicked at any angle,” said Prabakar.
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