Agricultural Recommendation System based on Deep Learning: A Multivariate Weather Forecasting Approach

Bangladesh is predominantly an agricultural country, where the agrarian sector plays an essential role in accelerating economic growth and enabling the food security of the people. The performance of this sector has an overwhelming impact on the primary macroeconomic objectives like food security, employment generation, poverty alleviation, human resources development, and other economic and social forces. Although Bangladesh's labor-intensive agriculture has achieved steady increases in food grain production, it often suffered from unfavorable weather conditions such as heavy rainfall, low temperature, and drought. Consequently, these factors hinder the production of food substantially, putting the country's overall food security in danger. In order to have a profitable, sustainable, and farmer-friendly agricultural practice, this paper proposes a context-based crop recommendation system powered by a weather forecast model. With extensive evaluation, the multivariate Stacked Bi-LSTM (three Bi-LSTM layers with a time Distributed layer) Network is employed as the weather forecasting model. The proposed weather model can forecast Rainfall, Temperature, Humidity, and Sunshine for any given location in Bangladesh with an average R-squared value of 0.9824, and the model outperforms other state-of-the-art LSTM models. These predictions guide our system in generating viable farming decisions. Additionally, our full-fledged system is capable of alerting the farmers about extreme weather conditions so that preventive measures can be undertaken to protect the crops. Finally, the system is also adept at making knowledge-based crop suggestions for the flood and drought-prone regions of Bangladesh.