Nowadays, the economy of countries highly depends on the agriculture productivity which has a great effect on the development of human civilization. Sometimes, plant diseases cause a major reduction in agricultural products. This paper proposes a new approach for the automatic detection and classification of plant leaf diseases based on using the ELM deep learning algorithm on a real dataset of plant leaf images. The proposed approach uses the k-means clustering algorithm for image segmentation and applies the GLCM for feature extraction. The BDA optimization algorithm is employed for feature selection, and lastly the ELM algorithm is used for plant leaf diseases classification. The presented approach optimizes the input weights and hidden biases for ELM. The dataset used in this study includes 73 plant leaf images, such that we tested our approach on four diseases that usually affect plants, including: Alternaria alternata, Anthracnose, Bacterial blight, and Cercospora leaf spot. The experimental results show that the proposed approach has achieved encouraging results in terms of these classification measures: accuracy, error rate, recall, F score, and AUC which are 94%, 6%, 92%, 95%, and 96% respectively. Babu