Artificial Intelligence for Sri Lankan Agriculture: Potential Practices, Challenges and Research Needs

Abstract

Agriculture is considered one of the world’s most prioritized sectors, while being an older occupation that started with the settlement of life on earth. A country's Food availability depends on agriculture, and demand for food production has increased with the growing population of Sri Lanka. Artificial Intelligence Technology has the potential to solve the problems while strengthening the agriculture. The author of this paper presents a substantial discussion on the Potential practices, Challenges and research needs of artificial intelligence in the Sri Lankan Context. The methodology adopted in the study is qualitative, with a literature content analysis. Artificial Intelligence can be applied for the automation of irrigation systems, monitoring crops and soil, detection of pests and diseases, monitoring of livestock health, application of pesticides, yield mapping and predictive analysis, automation of weeding and harvesting, sorting, surveillance, etc. The local challenges are financial issues, advanced technologies with limitation factors, adoption problems of people with minimum skills, and privacy and security problems relating to data. The extended research on Climate and crop-specific studies and integrated technologies for production chain optimization are noteworthy under Sri Lankan conditions. Sri Lankan Agriculture has the potential practices for applying Artificial Intelligence Technology following some Challenges and significant Research needs