eSagu™: a data warehouse enabled personalized agricultural advisory system

In this paper, we explain a personalized agricultural advisory system called eSagu, which has been developed to improve the performance and utilization of agriculture technology and help Indian farmers. In eSagu, rather than visiting the crop in person, the agricultural expert delivers the expert advice at regular intervals (once in one or two weeks) to each farm by getting the crop status in the form of digital photographs and other information. During 2004-06, through eSagu, agricultural expert advices delivered for about 6000 farms covering six crops. The results show that the expert advices helped the farmers to achieve savings in capital investment and improved the crop yield. Mainly, the data warehouse of farm histories has been developed which is providing the crop related information to the agricultural expert in an integrated manner for generating a quality agricultural expert advice. In this paper, after explaining eSagu and its advantages, we discuss how data warehouse of farm histories is enabling agricultural expert to deliver a quality expert advice. We also discuss some research issues to improve the performance of eSagu.