An Astute Irrigation System with Crop Management and Marketing

The rapidly increasing population of India has led to widening of the gap between the demand and supply for food. To cater to this increasing demand farmers are compelled to grow more crops with the help of irrigation systems. This system of farming uses a pump mechanism which requires the presence of an individual to check the water level. Sometimes it’s not feasible for the farmer to be present all the time. It causes difficulty in managing all farming activities. In addition to this, the warming climate is causing the lakes and rivers to dry up at a faster rate, while rapid urbanization and water pollution are putting enormous pressure on the quantity and quality of available water. A lot of water is wasted in the conventional irrigation system which can be reduced by effective usage and proper management. Adhering to this problem we want to propose a solution in the form of a mobile application which includes features such as automation of water pump operation that helps effective monitoring of water level, prediction of crop to be sown, marketing of crop, make available the current rate of the produce and ensure profitability by identifying potential buyers. The application will also provide information on the latest schemes introduced by the government. The usage of NodeMCU proves to be more cost effective than raspberry pi, and in turn benefit the farmer.

Introduction

The rapidly increasing population of India demands more food production. Our Indian system of farming and marketing totally depends on conventional systems and methods. While rapid urbanization and increasing demand are putting enormous pressure on the quantity and quality of crop production, using the conventional system and methods it’s very difficult for farmers to manage all the agricultural tasks and also get proper returns on investment. The conventional methods primarily use irrigation for the farming activities. Irrigation is controlled application of water to crops at needed intervals. It is mainly used to suffice water supply requirements that are not or partially satisfied by the rainfall. Many different traditional irrigation methods are still used such as surface water (river, streams, and ground), sprinkler, and drip irrigation to satisfy the plant’s thirst. In India, the existence of uneven topographies, causes variation in temperature, elevation, and rainfall in regions. Hence, the methods of traditional systems of water utilization and irrigation have evolved very differently over the years in different places.

Along with irrigation, crop management is also very important in agriculture. Crop management refers to the monitoring of agricultural parameters to improve the growth of crop and yield of agricultural produce. Growing right crops at the right time and in the right place plays a very important role in agriculture, which is an essential part of crop management. In the current scenario, farmers have limited knowledge about crop and soil conditions necessary for each crop type. When these conditions are not met according to the crop type, it affects both the crop quality and the yield. After crop management, the next important part is crop marketing. This involves selling of the agricultural produce yielded. Today’s agricultural marketing undergoes a sequence of transfers i.e. from farmers to brokers and then finally to the customers. Thus, the farmers do not earn the proper return on investment.

Literature review

For the development of the proposed system previous research papers on automation of irrigation system and monitoring of soil parameters were reviewed. The following subsection provides a short summary on research papers. In irrigation system main aim is to water plants as per their need. This need is dependent of different parameters such as soil temperature, moisture, pH level of soil etc. These values play a major role for deciding when to supply water to crop. The basic system uses soil temperature sensor and moisture sensor to collect all required data. This data is collected by microcontroller and depending on data received it will take decision. This system uses relay which will switch on water pump. It uses LCD display to show current status. The major disadvantage of this system is it is not suitable for farms spread over large geographical area.

When the area to be operated on is large, wireless sensor network need arises. The system divides the large geographical area in different zones. Each zone consists of wireless sensor unit which uses different sensors like temperature, soil moisture, humidity and water level. Each of these zones reports to a gateway unit, which handles all sensor information, takes appropriate action and transmits data to a web application. The sensor values can be monitored on the web page. In order to check this data user must have access to web application which is not possible all the time.

To overcome this issue, GSM system is used. The system will use GSM messages to control the automation of system. This replaces the need of internet connection. The users of this system are able to monitor the system using GSM messages and a simple android application. It is designed to allow users to access system at any time by eliminating need of web application. These messages are used to control system and to monitor information using android application. Android application will read data contained in message and display it to users. The disadvantage of this system is, it covered a low range of agricultural land and not economically affordable for all.

Proposed system

The objective of this project is to automate the work of irrigation to some extent and help the farmer to take beneficial decisions such as crops selection and crop marketing.

Modules

An Astute Irrigation System with Crop Management and Marketing is available to the users in the form of a mobile application that can be installed on mobile phones and some on-field hardware. Modules involved in the system are as follows:

Automatic Irrigation Module

This module automates the irrigation system by automatically turning on and off the water as per the requirement of the soil based on the temperature and humidity of the soil.

Crop Management Module

Crop Management module will enhance decision making of farmer to select the suitable crop to be grown in farm for the greater yield and returns. This module will check various aspect of soils and suggest farmers the best suitable crop for the soil.

Marketing module

After crop management it’s time for some returns, this module will help farmers to find best profitable market for their crops so that they can be sold with reasonable price. This module will give total profit the farmer can earn by deducting all other expenses.

Working

The first step is to register with the system in order to use system functions. For registration the user will have to use Gmail account. Once user is registered successfully, user can access the system using the registered google account. After the successful registration user will be prompted to select region of farm, height of water storage tank. This will help system in implementing automated irrigation and crop prediction. After successful registration the soil type will be used to suggest the best suitable crops to the user. While suggesting crops the system will consider previous year market need and current production of the crop. The user will select one crop from the suggested list. Once crop is selected then the system will set threshold parameters of NodeMCU to the crops required values. Then system will keep on monitoring various readings and takes appropriate corrective measures. Once the crop is harvested completely, the system will show the user's marketing strategies to sell the crops. This includes two strategies:

a) Sell crop in nearby market.

b) Sell crop to manufacturing unit. Whichever is selected, the system will show the expenses for selling the crop and after selling how much profit farmer can earn.

System design

An Astute Irrigation System with Crop Management and Marketing is a system with 3 modules: (1) Astute Irrigation System (2) Crop Management System (3) Crop Marketing System.

The above explains block level representation of proposed system. It shows how different modules will be interacting with each other and entire flow of the system.

Implementation details

To show the predictions and statistics of the farm, an application is developed that will help the user to monitor the farm. The application is a cross-platform application developed using Xamarin Software Development tool. Xamarin uses C# codebase to develop applications for Android, IOS, and Windows.

Communication between NodeMCU and the local server is carried out through socket using python. The data collected by NodeMCU from various sensors used is sent to the local server over the socket. Data received on the local server is forwarded to cloud database through web services. Data collected by NodeMCU on the local server is stored on Microsoft Azure Cloud. This real-time data is used by the application to carry out decision making and predictions of crops that are to be recommended to the user.

The application uses Google sign-in to authenticate the users. On Signing-in, the application will show the available gmail accounts on device. After selecting a user account, the application will authenticate the user and if registered already the user will be redirected to the homepage.

Once the user is authenticated successfully, the application will redirect the user to the homepage. Using only one language to display application is not good because it may happen that the end user is not able to understand that language and in such case, the user will not be able to use application. Hence, the application is designed in such a way that it will check default language of the device and set that language to display all application data. For now, the application can work for English, Hindi and Marathi language.

The system records the soil parameters in real time. Whenever the user wants to check the temperature and moisture of soil user can use an option of monitor farm status available on the homepage. On clicking the application will open a new window which will show the real-time data collected by sensors. This data will be displayed using a graph as shown in Fig.6.4

Conclusion

An Astute irrigation system with crop management and marketing is an application of modern smart irrigation system using technologies like IOT and decision making. The Astute irrigation system with crop management and marketing project capable of combining three modules viz. 1. Irrigation, 2. Crop Management, and 3. Marketing into one application. Its purpose is to allow farmers to monitor the irrigation process and thereby increase productivity. To understand the dynamics of the project, a basic idea about what is IOT and Decision making is required. This paper explains the entire working of An Astute irrigation system with crop management and marketing, along with minimum requirements needed to implement it.