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Precise forecasting of watermelon harvest volumes is vital within the agricultural supply chain, since it informs the deployment of farming inputs and streamlines stock and logistical scheduling. Conventional harvest assessment depends predominantly on human effort, rendering it both labour-intensive and slow. To tackle this issue, the present study proposes an algorithmic workflow that leverages unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) video to identify and count watermelons. The workflow combines You Only Look Once version 8s (YOLOv8s) with image mosaicking and overlapping region division, which supports whole-field watermelon quantity estimation. The detection model, built on YOLOv8s and refined via transfer learning, achieved 99.20% detection accuracy, underscoring its suitability for crop forecasting. The counting strategy, which employs image mosaicking and overlapping region division, accepts stitched panoramas as input and significantly reduces double counting compared to the video-tracking-based detection and counting method. Counting accuracy exceeded 96.61%, indicating strong promise for yield forecasting applications. This elevated accuracy attests to the practicability of deploying the proposed approach for total harvest estimation across expansive watermelon cultivations.

Leaf blight, caused by bacterial and fungal infections, threatens plant health by inducing leaf discoloration and reducing crop yield. To address this, we propose a MobileNetV3-based classifier for the Jasmine plant, leveraging streamlined Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to precisely identify disease stages. The design combines depthwise convolutional layers with max-pooling layers to extract superior features, focusing on vital low-level features that signal the condition. Via preprocessing methods that include data augmentation with a Conditional GAN and Particle Swarm Optimization for feature selection, the classifier achieves reliable performance. Assessment on carefully assembled datasets shows a remarkable 97% training accuracy, demonstrating its potency. Real-world trials across varying settings, including severe camera tilts and fluctuating illumination, verify the model’s durability, delivering test accuracies within the 94% to 96% range. The dataset’s bespoke structure for CNN-based classification ensures the reliability of the outcomes. Notably, the model’s compact classification, characterized by swift processing speed and minimal size, makes it a practical choice for immediate deployment. This all-encompassing strategy highlights the presented classifier’s value in managing leaf blight spot disease difficulties in cash crops.

Smart agriculture increasingly combines artificial intelligence, sensor networks, automation, remote sensing, robotics, and decision-support systems to guide agricultural production and resource management. These technologies promise more precise monitoring, faster diagnosis, improved input targeting, and better coordination of farm operations. Their sustainability value, however, depends on how optimisation goals are defined and how decisions interact with ecological, technical, and social systems. A central problem is that algorithmic systems are often evaluated through yield gains, input efficiency, prediction accuracy, or operational performance. These metrics are important, but they do not necessarily reveal whether an improvement in one sustainability domain shifts pressure onto another. A farm system may become more productive while increasing water demand, energy dependence, biodiversity risk, or unequal exposure to technological burdens. This article develops a conceptual model of algorithmic sustainability trade-offs in smart agriculture. The model explains how yield, water, energy, biodiversity, and equity operate as connected outcome domains rather than isolated evaluation categories. It treats trade-offs as system-level tensions that emerge through optimisation objectives, data availability, decision rules, platform design, governance arrangements, and implementation contexts. The article contributes a systems-oriented framework for analysing when smart agriculture supports sustainability and when it redistributes environmental or social costs. It argues that algorithmic optimisation should not be treated as automatically sustainable simply because it improves efficiency or prediction. Instead, smart agriculture should be assessed by how its decisions balance productivity, resource use, ecological resilience, and distributional fairness.