Adnan Shah Abir, a student of the 23rd batch of Khulna University's Agrotechnology Discipline, has built Gacher Daktar (Tree Doctor), a digital farm helpdesk with artificial intelligence built in. Farmers, rooftop gardeners and plant lovers take a clear photo of a diseased leaf or fruit, and the app's Smart Vision AI disease scanner analyses the spots and lesions to give the disease name, its cause and a prescription, Banglavision reports.
Several farm apps already exist, Adnan says, but most focus on one or two services; the team set out to bring the many services a farmer needs into one place. The app has more than 12 digital features.
For people who cannot read or write there is a live voice assistant: describe the problem aloud, in a regional dialect if need be, and advice comes straight back. Using data from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellite, it also gives early warnings about crop greenness, moisture and weak patches in a field.
The app puts organic and environmentally friendly control methods first. Where a chemical is needed, it lists the active ingredient beside the brand name so that shopkeepers cannot mislead farmers, and the prescription says how many teaspoons or bottle caps to mix in a 10-litre drum.
A local database covers hundreds of diseases and pests of more than 59 crops grown in Bangladesh, drawing on the Department of Agricultural Extension, the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, BRRI, BARI and BINA. It carries the Department of Agricultural Marketing's daily official market prices for all 64 districts, and a digital token system and community forum let farmers consult professional agriculturists free of charge on harder problems.
With government sponsorship and support, Adnan says, Gacher Daktar could become a true all-in-one digital solution for Bangladesh's agriculture, contributing to food security and farmers' incomes.
Reporting: Jahangir Zulfiqar, Khulna University, Banglavision
Photo: Ragib Hasan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Source: Banglavision
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