IoT-​based crop monitoring

Connecting different types of devices together to form a huge network is the main goal of IoT. Three aspects can be accomplished through IoT: automation, communication and cost-​effectiveness. IoT emancipates people from different farming activities; thus, it helps in saving their time and make them more productive. Environment monitoring provides data about air, temperature, condition of the soil, prediction of rain and water quality, and crop monitoring and animal monitoring enhance the productivity of the farm.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) with ATMEGA2535 processor and IC-​S8817 BS with ZigBee protocol observes the conditions of the farm along with a web application to store the data. Greenhouse-​based intelligent monitoring system based on ZigBee protocol performs transmission and receiving, data processing and data acquisition functions. The main aim is to reduce the manpower and cost, provide remote intelligence, and switch from wire to wireless technology, using B-​S structure and cc250 as processing chip for coordination (Dan et al., 2015; Haule & Michael, 2014).

Factors like soil moisture, soil pH, leaf wetness, and atmospheric pressure trigger sensors working on sprinklers. This automatic sprinkling system is implemented using WSN for conservation of water. The system also informs the farmer of the soil pH level through SMS using a GPS model (Vijayakumar & Nelson Rosario, 2011; Zhang et al., 2010). An effective solution is provided for household shrimp farming with improved accuracy and monitoring of environmental conditions using graphical user interface (GUI) programmed with LabView. This reduces the cost of labor and power consumption (Duy et al., 2015; Sivasankari & Gandhimathi, 2014).

A smart sensor enables the embedded system to make interactions with the environment that forms WSN. These sensors gather the soil moisture and temperature data applied to solve monetary and environmental problems. Data and information are provided using cloud computing to improve data storage capacity and processing capability (Sales et al., 2015).

This IoT-​based crop monitoring enables the collection of data about crops through wireless networks and the farmer uses this information to make the right decisions without bringing any loss to the crops. But wireless sensors pose challenges like having a user interface and less power consumption to improve productivity.