Data mining in agriculture is a very recent research topic. It consists in the application of data mining

Data mining

Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

 techniques to agriculture

Agriculture

Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...

. Recent technologies are nowadays able to provide a lot of information on agricultural-related activities, which can then be analyzed in order to find important information . A related, but not equivalent term is precision agriculture

Precision agriculture

Precision farming or precision agriculture is a farming management concept based on observing and responding to intra-field variations.It relies on new technologies like satellite imagery, information technology, and geospatial tools...

.

Prediction of problematic wine fermentations

Wine

Wine

Wine is an alcoholic beverage, made of fermented fruit juice, usually from grapes. The natural chemical balance of grapes lets them ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes, or other nutrients. Grape wine is produced by fermenting crushed grapes using various types of yeast. Yeast...

 is widely produced all around the world. The fermentation process of the wine is very important, because it can impact the productivity of wine-related industries and also the quality of wine. If we were able to predict how the fermentation is going to be at the early stages of the process, we could interfere with the process in order to guarantee a regular and smooth fermentation. Fermentations are nowadays studied by using different techniques, such as, for example, the k-means algorithm

K-means algorithm

In statistics and data mining, k-means clustering is a method of cluster analysis which aims to partition n observations into k clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean...

 , and a technique for classification based on the concept of biclustering

Biclustering

Biclustering, co-clustering, or two-mode clustering is a data mining technique which allows simultaneous clustering of the rows and columns of a matrix....

 . Note that these works are different from the ones where a classification of different kinds of wine is performed. See the wiki page Classification of wine

Classification of wine

The classification of wine can be done according to various methods including, but not limited to, place of origin or appellation, vinification methods and style, sweetness and vintage, or varietal used. Practices vary in different countries and regions of origin, and many practices have varied...

 for more details.

Detection of diseases from sounds issued by animals

The detection of animal's diseases in farms can impact positively the productivity of the farm, because sick animals can cause contaminations. Moreover, the early detection of the diseases can allow the farmer to cure the animal as soon as the disease appears. Sounds issued by pigs

PIGS

PIGS is a four letter acronym that can stand for:* PIGS , Phosphatidylinositol glycan anchor biosynthesis, class S, a human gene* PIGS , the economies of Portugal, Italy , Greece and Spain...

 can be analyzed for the detection of diseases. In particular, their coughs can be studied, because they indicate their sickness. A computational system is under development which is able to monitor pig sounds by microphones installed in the farm, and which is also able to discriminate among the different sounds that can be detected .

Sorting apples by watercores

Before going to market, apples are checked and the ones showing some defects are removed. However, there are also invisible defects, that can spoil the apple flavor and look. An example of invisible defect is the watercore. This is an internal apple disorder that can affect the longevity of the fruit. Apples with slight or mild watercores are sweeter, but apples with moderate to sever degree of watercore cannot be stored for any length of time. Moreover, a few fruits with severe watercore could spoil a whole batch of apples. For this reason, a computational system is under study which takes X-ray

X-ray

X-radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz and energies in the range 120 eV to 120 keV. They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma...

 photographs of the fruit while they run on conveyor belt

Conveyor belt

A conveyor belt consists of two or more pulleys, with a continuous loop of material - the conveyor belt - that rotates about them. One or both of the pulleys are powered, moving the belt and the material on the belt forward. The powered pulley is called the drive pulley while the unpowered pulley...

s, and which is also able to analyse (by data mining techniques) the taken pictures and estimate the probability that the fruit contains watercores .

Optimizing pesticide usage by data mining

Recent studies by agriculture researchers in Pakistan (one of the top four cotton producers of the world) showed that attempts of cotton

Cotton

Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective capsule, around the seeds of cotton plants of the genus Gossypium. The fiber is almost pure cellulose. The botanical purpose of cotton fiber is to aid in seed dispersal....

 crop yield maximization through pro-pesticide state policies have led to a dangerously high pesticide usage. These studies have reported a negative correlation between pesticide usage and crop yield in Pakistan. Hence excessive use (or abuse) of pesticides is harming the farmers with adverse financial, environmental and social impacts. By data mining the cotton Pest Scouting data along with the meteorological recordings it was shown that how pesticide usage can be optimized (reduced). Clustering of data revealed interesting patterns of farmer practices along with pesticide usage dynamics and hence help identify the reasons for this pesticide abuse.

Explaining pesticide abuse by data mining

To monitor cotton growth, different government departments and agencies in Pakistan have been recording pest scouting, agriculture and metrological data for decades. Coarse estimates of just the cotton pest scouting data recorded stands at around 1.5 million records, and growing. The primary agro-met data recorded has never been digitized, integrated or standardized to give a complete picture, and hence cannot support decision making, thus requiring an Agriculture Data Warehouse. Creating a novel Pilot Agriculture Extension Data Warehouse followed by analysis through querying and data mining some interesting discoveries were made, such as pesticides sprayed at the wrong time, wrong pesticides used for the right reasons and temporal relationship between pesticide usage and day of the week.

Literature

Since this research topic is quite recent, there is only one reference book. Data Mining in Agriculture is published by Springer and it is co-authored by Antonio Mucherino, Petraq Papajorgji and Panos Pardalos. A quick survey of the book can be found at this address. There are a few precision agriculture journals, such as Springer's Precision Agriculture or Elsevier's Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, but those are not exclusively devoted to data mining in agriculture.

Conferences

There are many conferences organized every year on data mining techniques and applications, but rather few of them consider problems arising in the agricultural field. To date, there is only one example of conference completely devoted to applications in agriculture of data mining. It is organized by Georg Ruß. This is the conference web page.