Agricultural Yield and Profit Prediction Using Big Data Analysis Techniques in Ethiopia

on wheat and teff

Ethiopia is the home of many agricultural products that determine the economic status of the
country. Among these agricultural products, wheat and teff can be mentioned. In many parts of
Ethiopia, farmers usually grow wheat and teff on a given plot of land. Farmer’s production has
declined to the extent of not feeding himself. Precision agriculture involves in collecting real time
data on weather, air quality, soil, crop maturity, equipment, labor costs and availability of existing
data. These predictive analytics can be used to make smarter decisions in agricultural field. The
common problem observed due to the lack of appropriate prediction system include Lack of
reliable and up-to-date information on supply, demand, stocks and export availability, Weaknesses
at national level to produce consistent, accurate and timely agricultural market data and forecasts,
Inadequate information on stocks, domestic prices, and linkages between international and
domestic markets, Inappropriate and/or uncoordinated policy responses to market crisis, increase
of the risk associated with local or national food systems.

In this study, the data will be collected from the National Statistics Center. The data sources contain
factors that affect the magnitude of crop yield produced. The data is going to be ingested and
explored before training the model. Then we identifying the model that answers the question more
accurately by comparing success metrics. Models will be evaluated for their predictive
performance. Measures of accuracy and confusion matrix will be used to evaluate the models.

Weka will be used for building predictive models. The tool is selected because it is widely applied
to predict problems. Moreover, it is flexible and easy to apply Java based open-source software.
IDEAR, is used to help visualize the data and prepare data summary reports.

The research is significant in many ways some of them are it will help farmers to get the price they
deserve and increase their profits and help farmers with making an informed decision on their
farmland, enable agricultural researcher to predict adequate amounts of yield, to curb the problem
of scarcity of agricultural researchers, contribute towards the successful achievement of one of the
programs of the government i.e., Food security by increasing grain yield production per unit area
through appropriate use of inputs, it will help researchers as a springboard for further study. It can
also assist the government in taking the necessary steps to avoid the confusion on policies related
to import of wheat that is needed to fulfil national demand.