Smart Techniques Employed for Monitoring of Agricultural Parameters

Agriculture is one of the primary occupations of man since early civilizations. Even today, manual intervention is inevitable. Around sixty to seventy per cent of the population depend on the resources from the agricultural sector. Asian nations rank second in terms of the farm field output. The agricultural sector is not fully automated with one of the main reasons being the cost. Controlled climatic conditions are very important for plant growth and hence for optimum produce. Farmers suffer large financial losses because of wrong predictions of weather and incorrect irrigation methods. In this context, with the evolution of miniaturized sensor devices coupled with wireless technologies, it is possible to remotely monitor parameters such as moisture, temperature, humidity and detect the leaf diseases. The projects objective is to design and develop an embedded system that can acquire the farm field parameters and efficiently process them so that it can be wirelessly transmitted to a remote place. According to the parameters that are received continuously by the end user, decision based on monitoring can be done. This improves the quality of plant growth and takes care of each of the nutrient parameters required for its growth. A part of the paper also deals with Greenhouse which plays an important part of the agriculture and horticulture sectors in our country as they can be used to grow plants under controlled climatic conditions for optimum produce. The proposed system is an embedded system which constantly monitors the digitized parameters of the various sensors and verifies them with the predefined threshold values and checks if any corrective action is to be taken by controlling the parameters inside the greenhouse by actuating a cooler, foggier, dripper and light respectively in accordance with the necessary conditions for the plants.