Sensor Based Irrigation Scheduling System for Efficient Water Resource Utilization

Abstract

Agricultural Sector in Pakistan is confronted with the major challenge of significantly increasing crop productivity to feed a fast-growing population. Decreasing availability and quality of natural resources is adversely affecting crop productivity in the short and long run. Pakistan is facing a severe shortage of water, making the country the fourth most water-stressed country in the world. Providing right amount of water at right time to any crop is important for the development of that crop. This is possible by intervening technology and automating the irrigation systems to be adopted to specific crop needs. The manual irrigation system leads to wastage of water and damaging of the crops due to uninformed watering, while commercially available smart irrigation systems are too expensive to be afforded by farmers. To overcome these problem, a low-cost smart crop monitoring and irrigation system is proposed based on IoT and mobile application. The primary aim of this project is the prevention of crop from spoilage during rain and reduce water wasting in irrigation process. Additionally, the system generates alarm to detect potential hazard into the farm. The operations have been performed using wireless sensor network technology with solar photovoltaic system, GSM module, Bluetooth, and sensors that are connected to the microcontroller. All experiments have been conducted in Multan, Pakistan during the year 2020-2021. By using this system, farmers will be able to improve crop productivity by controlling the water flow, monitoring the growth of crop, and securing the crops from potential hazards using mobile application.