**1. Introduction**

In the era technology enable modern agriculture, the people are keen about the organic farming due to environmental friendliness and more profitable agriculture. The people are diverting towards the organic farming as it uses less chemicalintensive pesticides. At present, agriculture besides farming includes forestry, fruit cultivation, dairy, poultry, mushroom, bee keeping etc. Today marketing, processing and distribution of agricultural products etc. are all accepted as a part of modern agriculture. Thus, agriculture can be defined as the art or science of production of crops and livestock on farm. There are three major types of agricultural practices in India, among them first one is Subsistence Agriculture which means farmers will grow crops for their self needs. Second is Commercial Farming, here farmers will grow crops for earning money by selling the grown crops and the last one is Sustainable Agriculture which is the efficient production of safe, high-quality agricultural product, in a way that protects and improves the natural environment, the social and economic conditions of the farmers.

Sustainable agriculture is farming in sustainable ways meeting sustainability criteria with adaptation of technological approaches. Sustainability criteria can be generally defined as the requirement to the sustainable quality of a product and its sustainable production, which have to be fulfilled in order to acquire a sustainability status. It mainly depends upon three dimensions those are Social Sustainability, Economic Sustainability and Environment Sustainability. The **Table 1** depicts the sustainability criteria for attaining the higher yield of the organic crop and sustainable agriculture based on three dimensions.

Earlier days there was no scarcity for food and water as it was used in efficient manner. But now a day there is scarcity of food and water as usage of technology and medicines have been increased due to increase in population growth of the country. To satisfy their needs there is a need in increase in crop production, to produce more crops more amount of fertilizer is being used as it develops more crops in short period of time. Eating these crops grown using more chemical fertilizer will be harmful to the human beings as it causes savior diseases. Hence it is must and should necessary for farmers to know about the usage of fertilizer for cropping and this fertilizer usage depends upon the amount of nutrient present in *Organic Farming for Sustainable Agriculture Using Water and Soil Nutrients DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100319*


#### **Table 1.**

*Important sustainability criteria in organic farming.*

the soil. The other issue is that farmers do not test their soil and hence they do not know the level of nutrients in soil. Nutrients are more essential for crop's growth as well as for human health. The deficiency of nutrients content in the crop will cause disease to plant such as stunted growth, leaf yellowing or browning and chlorosis. The human beings eating these nutrient deficient crops are also exposed to severe diseases such as growth disorders, increased susceptibility for infections, skin rashes and immune suppression. These nutrients are classified into micro and macro nutrients. Totally soil consists sixteen nutrients those are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen (which are supplied by air and water), calcium, magnesium, Sulfur (which are secondary nutrients), nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium (which are Macronutrients), boron, chlorine, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc (which are Micronutrients) among them the three major nutrients are Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K).

In organic farming, a proper soil testing will help the farmers to get the correct amount of nutrients present in the soil and to choose the right crop for growing. For achieving the sustainable agriculture, proper management of essential soil nutrients play a vital role. Technology such as IoT and Machine Learning plays an expedient role for improvement of environment and for achieving the economic goals.

Farming is one of the most important occupation since the beginning of civilization. Even though farmer is rich enough to serve the food for every individual of

the society but poor himself due to improper pricing for their cultivated crop due to the intervention of the third party in marketing the agriculture products. Since, the farmer's family is depending on cultivation, if crops are not as per the demands, then farmer's life becomes miserable hence farming occupation is low admired job. On the other hand, besides of having grown good quality crops or agriculture products they are enable to sell their crops due to occurrence of unexpected global health crisis such as Covid-19 (Novel Coronavirus). Because of the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 outbreak the government has imposed a countrywide lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Wherein all internal and external transport has been banned strictly this impacts the farmers with heavy losses due to lack of medium to transport. In such situation adopting to the smart farming techniques is beneficiary, in which everything including buying and selling of agriculture products are done through online sitting in home itself so that it will be profitable to both.

Focusing on encouraging innovation in agriculture, smart farming is the best answer to the problems stated above. This Smart Farming is a concept of agricultural management using modern Information and Communication Technologies such as IoT and Machine Learning to increase the quantity and quality of products. The internet of things (IoT), is a system of interrelated computing devices which are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human interaction. An IoT ecosystem consists of web-enabled smart devices such as sensors to measure the nutrients present in the soil. IoT devices share the sensor data they collect by connecting to an IoT gateway or other edge device where data is either sent to the cloud to be analyzed or analyzed locally. IoT can also make use of other technology such as machine learning to aid in making prediction based on collected data. IoT can benefit farmers in agriculture by making their job easier.

Machine Learning is the most popular technique of predicting the future or classifying information to help people in making necessary decisions. These algorithms learn from the past instances of data through statistical analysis and pattern matching. Then, based on the learned data, it provides us with the predicted results.

#### **1.1 Overview of proposed work**

The organic farming products require proper marketing facilities to the farmers. Information and Communication Technology play a vital role in connecting people all over the world in a fraction of second and has proven impact on their everyday life. It greatly effects in improving the lives of farmers in India. The smart phone is the most commonly used ICT tool all over world, and farmers have started to use mobile phone for communication in their native languages. So, it can help them in direct communication involving the farmers and buyer or customers. By investigating and considering the entire problem faced by farmers the proposed work has introduced smart farming based android mobile application which tests the soil nutrients using the IoT enabled light and color sensors. Farmers need to install the application on their mobile phones so that they can easily get/view the real time soil nutrient [N, P, K] values on their mobile phones. To determine the soil nutrients, value the hardware set up is made which includes sensor, Ardino microcontroller, serial port, cable connector, regulated power supply, soil sample.

The mobile application also helps in establishing the connection between farmers and Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) in order to attain Pricing uncertainty and marketing of the organic farming yields by avoiding the middle man. APMC is a state government body which ensures safeguard to the farmers from exploitation by large retailers. APMC admin can view the details of the

#### *Organic Farming for Sustainable Agriculture Using Water and Soil Nutrients DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100319*

registered farmers like land area, land number etc. The registered organic farmers of the mobile application get the facility to share the soil and water nutrients reports to the APMC authorities. Further based on the reports, the APMC authorities can recommend the suitable crop to be grown to the farmers and issue the organic certification. And also offers an agreement proposal to the farmer which consists of purchasing price and insurance for their yields thus promoting direct market and distribution facility to the farmers. The organic farming product are costly as it requires more workers and is produced in smaller amounts. According to this agreement, if in situations like Droughts, flood and any other Natural Disasters occurs the APMC authority should pay a minimum amount to the farmers which is fixed by the government. The mobile application also provides the facility for the farmers to get the awareness and usage of new tools and technology, and suggestive measure for the organic farming.
