Cotton crops, often called "white gold," face significant production challenges, primarily due to various leaf-affecting diseases. As a major global source of fiber, timely and accurate disease identification is crucial to ensure optimal yields and maintain crop health. While deep learning and machine learning techniques have been explored to address this challenge, there remains a gap in developing lightweight models with fewer parameters which could be computationally effective for agricultural practitioners. To address this, we propose an innovative deep learning framework integrating a subset of trainable layers from MobileNet, transfer learning, data augmentation, a learning rate decay schedule, model checkpoints, and early stopping mechanisms. Our model demonstrates exceptional performance, accurately classifying seven cotton disease types with an overall accuracy of 98.42% and class-wise precision ranging from 96% to 100%. This results in significantly enhanced efficiency, surpassing recent approaches in accuracy and model complexity. The existing models in the literature have yet to attain such high accuracy, even when tested on data sets with fewer disease types. The substantial performance improvement, combined with the lightweight nature of the model, makes it practically suitable for real-world applications in smart farming. By offering a high-performing and efficient solution, our framework can potentially address challenges in cotton cultivation, contributing to sustainable agricultural practices.

Accurate rainfall forecasting is crucial for effective disaster preparedness and mitigation in the North-East region of India, which is prone to extreme weather events such as floods and landslides. In this study, we investigated the use of two data-driven methods, Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), for rainfall forecasting using daily rainfall data collected from India Meteorological Department in northeast region over a period of 118 years. We conducted a comparative analysis of these methods to determine their relative effectiveness in predicting rainfall patterns. Using historical rainfall data from multiple weather stations, we trained and validated our models to forecast future rainfall patterns. Our results indicate that both DMD and LSTM are effective in forecasting rainfall, with LSTM outperforming DMD in terms of accuracy, revealing that LSTM has the ability to capture complex nonlinear relationships in the data, making it a powerful tool for rainfall forecasting. Our findings suggest that data-driven methods such as DMD and deep learning approaches like LSTM can significantly improve rainfall forecasting accuracy in the North-East region of India, helping to mitigate the impact of extreme weather events and enhance the region's resilience to climate change.