Journal of Krishi Vigyan

Expert support system has been recognized as a powerful tool to store human knowledge in computers for the purpose of making expert's knowledge available to users. The present study was an attempt to design anexpert system on fertilizer calculation for 100 crops covered in the package of practices of Kerala. The software development activities were carried out in five stages. During the first stage the decision making situation was studied in depth. This was followed by developing the prototype design and defining of variablesas a second stage. The database was developed in the third stage. The software design was completed and validated in the fourth stage. The final validation of the tool with the end users was done at the final stage. The developed software was able to give general and soil test based fertilizer recommendation. The recommendations were given for a single plant/unit area as well as for the whole field. The fertilizers can also be selected according to the local availability. The final software was made available in the domain www.farmextensionmanager.com