Abstract
By extending information and communication technologies, a personalizedagricultural advisory system called eSaguTMhas been developed in which the farmersreceive agricultural expert advice for each of their farms at regular intervals. The expertadvice is prepared by agricultural experts based on the crop status information receivedin the form of both digital photographs and text. During 2004-05, the eSaguTMsystemwas operated for 1051 cotton farms covering three villages in the state of AndhraPradesh, India. In eSaguTM, the expert advice had been delivered to every cottonfarm, once in a week. As a result, the data set consisting of about 20,000 such advicetexts had been generated. In this paper, we have carried out the cluster/textualanalysis experiments on the data set and reported interesting results concerning thedynamics of crop problems. Normally, all are cotton farms and belonging to nearbyarea/region should have faced similar problems. However, the cluster analysis of theadvices delivered on each day shows that significant number of farms are suffering fromdistinct crop production problems. The results also indicate that, a cluster of farmswhich face the same crop problem during one week face distinct crop problems duringthe subsequent weeks. Based on the results, we can conclude that it is necessaryto deliver agricultural expert advice to each farm by building agricultural advisorysystems which deliver farm-specific agricultural advices to reduce crop failures andimprove crop productivity.