The problem Agro solves

Agro is a portal for all the farmers in India that aims to help them. Since the advent of technology farmers in India have had little to no help from this field. We intend to change that and hence, we created this portal which :-

1. Gives accurate and meaningful Weather information
2. Warnings related to weather and epidemics/pests
3. Pest detection using State of the art ML model and image recognition
4. Crop Predictions for their particular soil type and climatic conditions
5. Maximise Revenue and maintain Soil Health
6. Forums for discussions with experts in Agriculture
7. End Resource Planning Model to sell the crops at the correct price in markets
8. News tailored to them, so that they are up to date with all the policies
9. Multi-lingual support for farmers with little exposure to English or Hindi
10. Basic Feature phone Support as well for those who don't have a smartphone and Internet Connection

(Ongoing Project)

Challenges I ran into

1. Making sense of the weather data is tricky and we had to sit down with an expert to guide us
2. No APIs directly give the weather warnings for a region and hence we had to scrape the MET (Meteorological Department) website to deliver accurate weather warnings
3. pH of the soil is a feature of the soil that greatly affects what plant and how it will grow. We decided to take the pH via the Soil Health Card mandatorily given to all farmers with information about their soil. We will ask for a photo of the card and use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract information from it
4. Multi-lingual support is very difficult to achive and we are still working on that. Current we support English and Hindi and plan to give other major languages like Marathi, Kannada, etc. via Google Translate API
5. Support for farmers with a basic feature phone is also tough. We managed to overcome it by using a text (SMS) based system, where we provide an option menu and the user selects the option to get desired information

(This is an ongoing project and hence we may face more challenges but will surely rise to the occasion)