SMART AGRICULTURE: FROM SOIL TO MARKET

Team: Team Krishimitra

ID:

Introduction:
In todays technical advancements, we have seen IoT is one of the promising technologies
which can make our daily chorus easier. IoT is rapidly gaining popularity in various fields
like medical, transportation, houses etc. Agriculture is one such field which has not come in
limelight yet from IoT community. We focus to have end to end solution for making
agriculture, the Smart Agriculture. Currently farmers need to manually take of various
activities such as watering plants, checking when to use fertilizers, maintaining temperature
in greenhouses, for fish farmers, maintaining Ph of water etc. All this work needs constant
attention by farmers. In case, Farmer is not available in the farm for some days, this may
cause severe damage to crops. Our Smart agriculture concept provides solution to these
difficulties by automating all these things using sensor network and cloud technologies. In
India, Farmers do not make use of any technologies for their farming activities. Lack of
information and need of constant human attention on field; results in less production or lower
quality products. Once All the activities are automated, We expect increase in good quality
crops which ultimately helps farmer financially. Also we will introduce smart irrigation in
agriculture which helps in proper use of water resources.

Detailed Problem Statement and Prescribed Solution

Indian Agriculture system completely relies on human efforts in all the farming activities.
Some of challenges involved are maintaining right moisture levels, ph levels in soil. For
greenhouses, maintaining temperature, moisture is most important. For fish farms, we need to
maintain water level and Ph of water. Some of these things cant be done manually to the
needed precision which may affect crop/fish growth. Things such as measuring PH level,
moisture levels etc. are not straight forward for farmers. Farmers most of the time take action
based on the symptoms they see in crops. But as we know, prevention is better than cure. We
should take care of adjusting above parameters before we see abnormalities in crops. This in
turn causes financial loss to the farmers. In india, water shortage is one more problem which
farmers need to deal during summers. Many times crops die due to improper water supplies.
Hence we propose Smart Agriculture solution to solve above problems. We will have smart
irrigation system in our solution, which will solve water scarcity problem to some extent

Our Solution Smart Agriculture starts from soil conditioning to maintaining crops, to
storage and then to transportation to market. We cover following modules in smart agriculture
system namely Soil farming, Greenhouse Farming, fish farming, storage and transportation.
A) Soil Farming: This involves farming in open lands. First activity that is carried out in farming
is preparing soil for production. We need to check Ph levels, moisture content of soil. Also we
need to take necessary measures to control these parameters. Smart agriculture will use
sensors for Ph level and moisture to sense them and will control them by taking proper
measure. Once the Soil is prepared and seeds are planted, next thing is to use water resource
smartly to avoid over watering or under watering as well as using water resources prudently
and conserving them for summers. Smart irrigation will serve this purpose
B) Greenhouse farming: Apart from soil conditioning, greenhouse farming needs to take care of
moisture level and temperature inside green house. In Smart agriculture, we will create a
network of sensors for sensing moisture and temperature in the green house. Based on data
collected, these parameters will then be adjusted either automatically or by farmer.
C) Fish Farming: For fish farming, In the big pond, fish eggs are stocked. They are regularly fed
and harvested. For proper fish growth, we need to set the Water Ph level, and temperature of
water to fasten the fish growth. This will be done using sensor network.
D) Storage: various food items require different storage conditions. Some items need cold
environment, some need warmer environment. Some items need to completely avoid
moisture in storage room. Some products such as fishes need ice for preservation. Fruits like
mango need warmth for ripening. Using network of sensors, we can adjust this parameters to
suit individual needs. Farmer can set the values using easy GUI and then sensor network will
keep maintaining those values. This will reduce food wastage caused due to improper storage
conditions.
E) Transportation: Many times goods are misplaced during transportation. Sometimes
middlemen take out goods before actually weighing them and paying price to farmer. We can
keep watch on transport by using GPS sensors and CCTV in the transport vehicle. GPS
module helps in keeping track of transport vehicle and farmer will get continuous updates on
the route taken by vehicle. CCTV will help in keeping watch on middlemen or vehicle drivers
in case of theft of goods.
Thus SMART AGRICULTURE provides an end to end solution to farming needs. It takes
care of all problems in farming starting from plantation to market. Thus we call it SMART
AGRICULTURE system

Uniqueness of the project:

There are some efforts been put to automate the agricultural irrigation system by
using GSM based motor controllers but that is limited to the irrigation. Current IoT market

does not have such solution for agriculture available. For Indian market, we will need to have
low cost solution. Here we propose extensive use of IoT in agricultural field right from
sowing to selling yielded crop. As the farmer would have a statistical data for years saved,
farmer can predict the yield, allowing him to manage his expenses. We propose to use of
renewable energy resources to run the complete IoT system, which would incur one time
investment. Thus our product will be unique low cost solution for turning the agriculture into
smart agriculture.

System level / Concept Block Diagram:

Fig.1 System block diagram

Fig.2 Concept level diagram

What would we do if selected?
Generally one crop cycle is for 5-6 months, here we will be doing our initial
prototype development in first three months and install the minimal system during sowing.
Over the period we will increase the sensor network to cover the all areas as mentioned in
introduction. Calibration or changes required in the system will be done during this period.
So basically we are planning to run pilot system over the one crop cycle.
If selected we will develop a prototype, which would consist of all 5 modules in it.
We will develop a prototype sensor network which will capture data about temperature, moisture, Ph.
levels etc. These will then be sent to main controller which will contain microcontroller such as
raspberry pi. Raspberry pi will communicate with cloud to exchange data with farmer. Farmer can
view this data using his smartphone or computer. Raspberry pi can have its own display and GUI
which will be installed at suitable place. Using this GUI, farmer can get information regarding crops.
Then based on preselected values of these parameters, we will control irrigation, ph values,
temperature as needed in different modules.
Farmer can also change these expected values from GUI. The prototype will be using
Wi-Fi modules for communication between sensor and main microcontroller. However in future we
will try to have long range communication devices to cover the overall farm.

Long term plans:

The resolve the shortcomings of the pilot run would be the next challenge. We as
a team understand that, there would be enormous uncertainties present when we are working
in actual outdoor environment and to tackle these challenges to make it more robust system
would be the key. In long term, we have a plan to enhance our sensor network, sensors and
data collection methods based on pilot project run. In long term, we will try to optimize the
sensor network. We will add more sensors. We will try to improve the range limitation of WiFi modules by finding long range alternative or inventing some type of hopping protocol to
keep the Wi-Fi modules as it is but cover long area.

Limitations :
Major limitation, can be the protection of the sensor network and communication
infrastructure in the field. Its quite possible that people working in the field may not
understand the importance of the sensor / infrastructure built and that can result into
maintainability issues of the sensor network. Other limitations include sensor failures,
unavailability of network at farming site. We can remove dependency on network by
eliminating cloud where network is not available.
Apart from this, availability of electricity is one limitation. Our sensor modules can
run on low power but the control part will need to use the electricity. For example, for
maintaining moisture, we need to control irrigation which will need electricity. With such
limitations, complete automation may not be feasible but can be partly established.

Hardware, Software and Cloud platforms to be used:

Hardware: Temperature , humidity , pH and other required sensors from Analog devices. Wireless
sensor kit from Analog Devices can be used during development , but to make it cost effective
solution we will using low cost sensors and wifi nodes. For collection of nodes data and sending it to
the cloud we will be using Raspberry-pi3.
Software : Bare metal C programming will be used for sensor nodes data collection. For controller
we will be using Linux operating system. We are planning to use google cloud platform for the sensor
data collection and control.

References:
Meonghun Lee, Jeonghwan Hwang2 , Hyun Yoe3, Agricultural Production System based on IoT,
IEEE 16th International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, 2013

M.K.Gayatri , J.Jayasakthi , Dr.G.S.Anandha Mala , Providing Smart Agricultural Solutions to

Farmers for better yielding using IoT, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological
Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)
Sanbo Li , Application of the internet of things technology in precision agriculture irrigation
systems, International Conference on Computer Science and Service System,2012