LoRa WAN based Agricultural Support System For Optimum crops Yield

Pakistan is an agriculture farming country and nearly 60% of its population is associated with agribusiness directly or indirectly. Punjab is the most agricultural province. Wheat, Corn, Paddy, and Vegetables are the four major crops of Pakistan. Intelligent and smart farming practices are being use

Project Title

LoRa WAN based Agricultural Support System For Optimum crops Yield

Project Area of Specialization

Internet of Things

Project Summary

Pakistan is an agriculture farming country and nearly 60% of its population is associated with agribusiness directly or indirectly. Punjab is the most agricultural province. Wheat, Corn, Paddy, and Vegetables are the four major crops of Pakistan. Intelligent and smart farming practices are being used globally. However, still in Pakistan, many problems like weather diseases and pests, became more harmful and a considerable figure of farmers lack familiarity with the precise agronomy practices. These practices comprise the use of the latest technology, soil preparation and irrigation, advanced method for insects, pests and disease control, fertilizers applications, and multi-cropping practices. Wheat, Corn, Paddy, and Vegetables are harvested all along in Punjab but Kasur, Khanewal, T.T. Singh, Sahiwal, Lahore, Gujranwala, Sheikhupura, Jhang, Narowal, Pakpattan, Sialkot, and Okara districts of Punjab are the most fertile districtics of Punjab but due to lack of proper technology yield is less than developed countries. The remote sensing facility is being provided by SUPARCO Pakistan to advance the yields of crops.
Yet, a Smart decision-making system after acquiring input parameters based on Real-Time monitoring for an efficient yield of crops is needed. Therefore, to give recommendations and cautions required for optimum yield, a smart system consisting of integrated sensor, cloud, and decision support layers and networking based on Decision Support System (DSS) is being developed in this project. The sensors system containing temperature and humidity sensor, NPK sensor, soil moisture sensor, pH sensor, and soil Electric conductivity sensor will transmit the statistics to cloud over the internet by the use of LoRa(Long Range) WAN(Wide Area Network). Lora is the latest technology in the field of communication which has range of several kilometers without using lots of power. An android application will be provided to the user, on which real-time data according to GPS location and available information can be viewed easily. The Decision Support System (DSS) will contemplate the accessible information from sensors, past patterns, the effect of climate trends and appropriately give recommendations and cautions required for efficient yield. Based on accurate real-time field data, this project also embraces smart irrigation with smart control and smart decision making. This project is being executed in collaboration with Ayub Agricultural Research Institute, Sahiwal, Pakistan.

Project Objectives

Research Objectives:

• To identify and propose the issues faced by the agriculturists and farmers in Pakistan.
• To implement the design of the solution proposed after well-backed research.
• To develop the solar-powered GPS based LoRa sensor nodes and transference of real-time data to central server/cloud through IoT gateway from the integrated nodes installed in geographically distributed locations.
• To develop the online cloud database to store and process the data from multiple installed nodes at various fields.
• To develop the Smart Decision Support (DSS) system software which will take into deliberation the available data from sensors, and consequently provide recommendations, auto-irrigation, suggestions, and alarms needed for optimal yield for each location.
• To develop the android application where data from the cloud will be received and real-time data along with projected recommendations in the form of notifications will be available for each site.
• To implement the auto irrigation techniques in smart agriculture system.

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   Academic Objectives:
• To partially fulfill the Final Year Project (FYP) to complete the bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

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  Commercial Objectives: 

• To develop and design such a smart and intelligent system that will take into account the parameters and propose the solution automatically to the farmers and agriculturists in an agriculture-backed economic country-Pakistan.

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  Other Objectives: 

• To bring a positive change in the agricultural conventions of Pakistan.

Project Implementation Method

The project has been divided into different phases.

1. •  Collecting data through sensors
2. •  Data transmission
3. •  Analysis, Data acquisition, and display of data. 

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Methodology.

• First of all, sensors systems containing temperature and humidity sensors, NPK sensors, soil moisture sensors, pH sensors, and soil Electric conductivity sensors will get data from the fields in which they are incorporated.
• This data will be fetched by the microcontroller unit which will process the data from sensors and based on the values of the humidity and moisture sensor, it will take action on auto-irrigation.
• After that, the processed and unprocessed data from the microcontroller will be sent to the LoRa gateway using the LoRa communication module on the microcontroller.
• At LoRa Gateway the will be received from the node and sent to the cloud using the things internet API.
• The things internet API takes care of data and sends encrypted data to google firebase cloud services.
• Algorithms and intelligent systems in the cloud will process the data received and compare the data with the ideal values that are already there.
• At last, this data will be sent to the web and android application along with the recommendations and suggestions to the user.

Benefits of the Project

Key Benefits and Beneficiaries:

• A lay farmer will get the benefit of the smart system.
• There will be no need to travel so long only to check the current condition of the crop.
• LoRa is a long-range communication protocol and consumes less power but no less range or network constraints. LoRa is used because it does not need any communication infrastructure to build and LoRa has a range of several kilometers.
• Monitoring of macronutrients, PH, and Electric conductivity of soil plays an important role in the excellent yield of crops.
• The farmer can check on his crops at any time of day.
• Auto irrigation system in this project will release the tension of farmers to water their fields.
• Enhance the production of crops by giving valuable information to farmers on time.
• An app and SMS alert system will ensure timely and accurate communication between farmers and their fields.
• This project can be implemented with other technologies like drone imagining of crops or real-time data from satellites to monitor the condition of crops further.
• Also, this project can be implemented with automated fertilizer and pest sprayer.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The final deliverable of the project is. When nodes are installed in the fields at diverse locations on the various farms, this prototype will be capable of real-time monitoring of potato crop parameters. An Android Smart Phones application will be enough for the landowners or farmer for easy monitoring of all aforementioned parameters after the completion of this project. This IoT application will be able to store, access, and retrieve the data from anywhere and anytime. Most of the aspects of farming will be much easy for a lay farmer after the accomplishment of this project. Easy-to-use, the user-friendly interfaced application will help in advanced technology awareness for a lay farmer. By deploying an IoT-based smart agriculture system the efficiency rate of the potato crops can be improved, and problems of farmers also are abridged.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Agriculture

Other Industries

Core Technology

Internet of Things (IoT)

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, Partnerships to achieve the Goal

Required Resources

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