Microclimate monitoring system for irrigation water optimization using IoT

Abstract

The new notion of Agri (from ‘Agre’, latin for Land) – Culture (latin for Cultivation) is what made the transition of human race from primitive hunter-gatherers to more civilized and ordered societies. The invention of agriculture can be regarded as a key point in the timeline and dawn of modern civilization as we know it today. With the advent of digital electronics, we are now capable of carefully device systems to make any processes more optimized and generate significantly higher output, this is also true for the agriculture sector and many works are carried out recently aimed towards this objective and even created a new domain of precision agriculture. In this research work, an IoT-based system was developed that enables the farmers to monitor various micro-climatic parameters and assess the irrigation water requirement. The soil moisture and temperature were sensed with the aid of sensors and were fed to the LoRA system, in the receiver side, data is analyzed for the estimation of evapotranspiration. The global evapotranspiration was estimated using Cropwat software. The sensor data were analyzed using Mcguinnes-Bordne formulation and the outcome of this research work paves the way towards the estimation of the evapotranspiration in the microclimate environment.

Keywords

• IoT
• LORA
• Cropwat
• Precision agriculture
• Smart farming