Sustainable agriculture using eco-friendly and energy efficient sensor technology

Abstract

Agriculture requires the dedication of many natural resources, including land, water, and energy. The quality and quantity of these natural resources has degraded over the years due to various economic problems associated with increased cost of inputs, decreased farm incomes, ever declining land, labour, energy resources and also ecological problems such as soil, water pollution and soil erosion, putting the viability of future agricultural operations at risk. The remedy to this is to adopt sustainable agriculture which supports careful management and cultivation of crops involving less use of fertilizer, pesticides, calculated use of precious natural resources like energy, water through controlled irrigation and fertigation practices with the help of green sensor technology and electronic control systems. The paper provides efficient automated farm monitoring and irrigation techniques which incorporate wide range of sensors to remotely sense and monitor various parameters of the soil like temperature, moisture, fertility and regulate the supply of water and fertilizer to the land based on the requirement. An algorithm formulated with the threshold values of sensor outputs is used to code the microcontroller which performs the required actions by employing relays until the strayed-out parameter has been brought back to its optimum level. The cloud based user friendly interface facilitates real-time data logging of environmental parameters while also supporting analysis of past statistics for future growth by means of a web-based customizable application. Furthermore, the project aims to optimize the use of land and labour, conserve water, increase crop yield, avoid wastage of energy and provide maximum automation and benefit the society by adopting smart environment friendly technology to implement newer and sustainable ways of agriculture.