Rice is one of the most widely cultivated crops throughout the world. Health, quality and production potential of rice plants often gets severely affected by several plant diseases. Brown spot and blast diseases are among the worst diseases that seriously affect rice production worldwide. Both of these diseases are characterised by appearance of distinct shaped lesions on the plant leaves. The efforts to control the disease include using fungicides, pesticides and other such chemicals. However, no image processing based technique has yet been proposed for determination of such plant diseases. In this research, the colour texture of 400 rice leaf images is analysed using a pattern recognition method and the results of the study for early and accurate detection of leaf spots are presented. If the suggested technology is embedded into camera phones, a farmer can detect the diseases much before these diseases show their destructive symptoms without any help from a plant pathologist.

India is popularly known as an agriculture driven nation, since the majority of its population is employed in agriculture, thus, making agriculture backbone of the Indian economy. Agriculture is an engine of growth and poverty reduction in the majority of developing nations. Strengthening rural people, directly and indirectly, contributes to nations’ development. As in India, the rural population mostly comprises of marginal and landless farmers, there is a need for a low cost and maximum profit plan to enhance both their income as well as socio-economic status. One such plan is to set up a small-scale mushroom production unit which requires by-products of the agricultural farm as input and occupy less agricultural land space. Mushroom cultivation is a minimum input maximum output venture proving to be an additional source of income. The vegetarian population residing in the urban areas of our country has now accepted mushrooms in their diet because of its nutritional values so the mushroom produced from the nearby rural areas has a good market of selling their products easily and at a good price. Thus, the mushroom is a boon to both producer and consumer giving it the status of superfood. Mushroom cultivation can also be a way to empower the rural women, provide additional income for the sustenance of farming families and tackle the problem of lack of nutritional requirement of the rural people. Rural women are the most productive workforce in the economy, raising the need to strengthen and improve their socio-economic status. A low-cost small-scale mushroom production unit can generate income through the sale of spawns, in addition to the sale of fresh mushroom in a sustainable approach by utilizing farm by-products as their raw material.

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