Sustainable practices for plant nutrient control using IoT

Abstract

Fertilizers play a key role in promoting healthy plant growth and increasing crop yields. However, excessive use of fertilizers often leads to several negative environmental impacts, including soil pollution, nutrient runoff into water bodies and reduction of long-term soil fertility. An abrupt ban on the use of fertilizers would be infeasible hence, sustainable practices play a huge role towards the management of crop health and productivity. To address the challenge, the mentioned proposal introduces an IoT-based Plant Nutrient Control System designed to work towards soil conservation. The proposal revolves around the usage of NPK (Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and Potassium (K)) sensors for providing real-time data on soil nutrient concentrations. The data collected from the NPK sensors is transmitted to a cloud service (Google Firebase) for storage purposes. The system analyzes the data based on which it checks off the necessity of the required minerals for healthy plant growth. It then provides recommendations to the farmers regarding the minimal amount of fertilizer content that will be necessary for the same. Also, the system continuously monitors the moisture and temperature of the soil. In case of a need for watering, the system sends an alert to the farmer. Therefore it has a userfriendly interface, which is developed using Kodular API, ensuring that data is accessible to farmers through minimal complexity.