Agrochemical application is an important tool in the agricultural industry for the protection of crops. Agrochemical application with conventional sprayers results in the waste of applied agrochemicals, which not only increases financial losses but also contaminates the environment. Targeted agrochemical sprayers using smart control systems can substantially decrease the chemical input, weed control cost, and destructive environmental contamination. A variable rate spraying system was developed using deep learning methods for the development of new models to classify weeds and to accurately spray on desired weeds target. Laboratory and field experiments were conducted to assess the sprayer performance for weed classification and precise spraying of the target weeds using three classification CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) models. The DCNNs models (AlexNet, VGG-16, and GoogleNet) were trained using a dataset containing a total of 12,443 images captured from the strawberry field (4200 images with spotted spurge, 4265 images with Shepherd’s purse, and 4178 strawberry plants). The VGG-16 model attained higher values of precision, recall and F1-score as compared to AlexNet and GoogleNet. Additionally VGG-16 model recorded higher percentage of completely sprayed weeds target (CS = 93%) values. Overall in all experiments, VGG-16 performed better than AlexNet and GoogleNet for real-time weeds target classification and precision spraying. The experiments results revealed that the Sprayer performance decreased with the increase of sprayer traveling speed above 3 km/h. Experimental results recommended that the sprayer with the VGG-16 model can achieve high performance that makes it more ideal for a real-time spraying application. It is concluded that the advanced variable rate spraying system has the potential for spot application of agrochemicals to control weeds in a strawberry field. It can reduce the crop input costs and the environmental pollution risks.

Agriculture waste has increased annually due to the global food demand and intensive animal production. Preventing environmental degradation requires fast and effective agricultural waste treatment. Aerobic digestion or composting uses agricultural wastes to create a stabilized and sterilized organic fertilizer and reduces chemical fertilizer input. Indeed, conventional composting technology requires a large surface area, a long fermentation period, significant malodorous emissions, inferior product quality, and little demand for poor end results. Conventional composting loses a lot of organic nitrogen and carbon. Thus, this comprehensive research examined sustainable and adaptable methods for improving agricultural waste composting efficiency. This review summarizes composting processes and examines how compost additives affect organic solid waste composting and product quality. Our findings indicate that additives have an impact on the composting process by influencing variables including temperature, pH, and moisture. Compost additive amendment could dramatically reduce gas emissions and mineral ion mobility. Composting additives can (1) improve the physicochemical composition of the compost mixture, (2) accelerate organic material disintegration and increase microbial activity, (3) reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) and ammonia (NH₃) emissions to reduce nitrogen (N) losses, and (4) retain compost nutrients to increase soil nutrient content, maturity, and phytotoxicity. This essay concluded with a brief summary of compost maturity, which is essential before using it as an organic fertilizer. This work will add to agricultural waste composting technology literature. To increase the sustainability of agricultural waste resource utilization, composting strategies must be locally optimized and involve the created amendments in a circular economy.

The density of herbaceous crops creates a suitable environment to produce pathogens in the soil that intensify the attack of pathogens traditionally controlled by disinfectant, which are mostly prohibited and unlisted because of their toxicity. Grafting is an alternative technique to enhance abiotic stress tolerance and reduce root diseases due to soil-borne pathogens, thus enhancing crop production. This research study was conducted during the crop season of 2017 and 2018 in order to investigate the interactive effect of different grafting techniques of hybrid scion onto local rootstocks on plants survival, plant phenological growth, fruit yield and fruit quality under a controlled environment. The hybrid cucumber was also planted self-rooted. The cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) cv. Kalaam F₁, Syngenta was grafted onto four local cucurbitaceous rootstocks; ridge gourd (Luffa operculate Cogn.), bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.), pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo L.), bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl.) using splice grafting, tongue approach, single cotyledon and hole insertion grafting techniques and self-rooted hybrid cucumber under greenhouse conditions. The experimental results indicated that all local cucurbitaceous rootstocks showed a high compatibility with hybrid cucumber scion in the splice grafting method compared to other grafting and non-grafted methods. Lagenaria siceraria rootstocks were found highly compatible with cucumber cv Kalaam scion which gave significantly maximum plant survival rates (95%) due to high sap contents, high SPAD value, better vegetative growth and maximum fruit yield when compared with other rootstocks by employing the splice grafting method followed by tongue approach, single cotyledon and hole insertion grafting while the fruit quality of all rootstocks was observed to be similar. The non-grafted cucumber cv. Kalaam F₁ showed significant results of plant vegetative growth, fruit development and fruit quality and encountered grafting methods while the lowest result were associated with the hole insertion grafting method in all scion/rootstock combinations. The grafted plants have no significant effect on cucumber fruit dry matter and fruit quality while the fruit mineral compositions (N, P, K, Ca and Mg) were higher among grafted and non-grafted plant fruits. The results indicate that grafting hybrid cucumber onto four local cucurbitaceous rootstocks influenced growth, yield and fruit quality. Grafting can be alternative and control measure for soil-borne disease and to enhance cucumber production.