Drip Irrigation Detection For Power Outage-Prone Areas With Internet-Of-Things Smart Fertigation Managemant System

In drip irrigation agriculture or fertigation technique, sufficient amount of water and nutrients are crucial for a plant's growth and development. An electronic timer is usually used to control the plant watering automatically and the scheduling is set according to different levels of plant growth. The timer has to be adjusted frequently since the required amount of water is different according to the growth stages. In power outage-prone regions, the problem with scheduled irrigation using timer becomes worsen since the watering schedule is disrupted by occasional black-outs, leading to an insufficient supply of water and nutrients, which leads to poor crop yields. Typical solution for such problems is by hiring field works to monitor the functionality of the automated system, plant health, and to re-adjust the timer once a power outage occurs. However, this solution is ineffective, time-consuming, and acquires high overhead costs. This paper proposes a systematic irrigation method using the internet-of-things (IoT) framework in order to improve the monitoring of plant growth and consequently improves the efficiency of the workflow. This systematic fertigation monitoring system consists of power outage alerts, and on-line notifications of plant irrigation, pesticide delivery, and polybag cleaning schedule. As a result, by using the proposed system, higher efficiency in farming management is achieved, with a 40% reduction in manpower, as compared to a typical fertigation-based farming system. This system demonstrates greater control over irrigation scheduling, plant growth, recording of pesticide scheduling automatically, and polybag cleaning, all of which will improve crop yields significantly.