How to smarten your Agriculture System?!

Global warming has created unpredictable weather conditions worldwide. Extreme climate changes like hail storms and droughts result in extensively damaged crops, fruits, and vegetables. 

Farmers have traditionally been hapless in the face of natural adversity. Losses due to natural factors like heat/cold, rain, hail, or drought are a few of the misfortunes faced by the farming community, leading to a reduction in crop yields, in turn, resulting in shortages, reduced farmer incomes, and paradoxically, increased consumer prices.

Technology, as always, comes to the rescue. The primary goal of farm automation technology is to cover the shortcoming of agri-producers and to help solves some of the key challenges of farming. 

Students at Shri Shankaracharya Institute of Professional Management and Technology, Raipur, Chattisgarh tried to leverage their learnings from the FICE’s Intel Intelligent Systems Lab program, to tackle this problem.

Trained on embedded systems and the Internet of Things, students worked on Intel platforms, tools and used them to develop this innovative project.

The primary purpose of the solution formulated by students – Aniket Soni, Arvind Singh Solanki and, Sunil Kumar – is to minimize the damage in production due to natural factors through the use of technology. 

They proposed to divide farmlands into grids with each part of the grid under the monitoring and control of an IoT system supervised by microcontrollers. 

Excess rain or hail will be detected by the systems, thus the farm can be provided with protective wings/coverings through the help of gear motors. Actuated and controlled through commonly available mobile systems. Temperature, humidity, and soil moisture are measured using DHT sensors and capacitive moisture sensors. Inputs from these sensors will be used for taking decisions on irrigation and overhead coverage as needed. 

Click the video below for a more interactive description of this Smart Agriculture System.

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