Paddy drying process depends upon ambient conditions, paddy quality, temperature and mass of hot drying air. Existing techniques of paddy drying process are highly nonlinear. In this paper, a neural network based automated controller for paddy drying is designed. The designed controller manages the steam temperature and blower motor speed to achieve constant paddy drying time. A Layer recurrent neural network is adopted for the controller. Atmospheric conditions such as temperature and humidity along with the size of the paddy are used as input to the network. Experimental results show that the developed controller can be used to control the paddy drying process. Implementation of developed controller will help in controlling the drying time at almost constant value which will definitely improve the quality of rice.