Smart Farming and Monitoring System

Abstract

In a country like Pakistan where agriculture is considered the backbone of the economy, with the increase in population, we are in dire need to improve our productions and yield both in terms of quantity and quality. Moreover, freshwater is the most important aspect of life, but a major part of our water resources is spent in the agricultural sector because the water requirements for irrigation have never been more demanding. If we keep wasting water at such a pace, we are expected to run out of our water resources in the near future. So, a system like Smart Farming is the need of the time. In smart farming, technology like IoT (internet-of-things) is integrated into the agricultural sector which results in much faster and simpler farming techniques as compared to the traditional farming techniques. The recent works done in the field of agriculture used technologies like Bluetooth, GSM, XBEE that were expensive, consumed more power, and were low range. To avoid such problems, we devised a new methodology that used Lora-based end devices. In this paper, we discussed the methodology for IOT based smart farming using the LoraWan protocol and other Lora-based technology that made this project both, inexpensive and easy to implement. This system consists of a hardware device that send data to the TICK Stack with the help of NodeRed via MQTT Broker. The TICK Stack is connected to the MongoDB database which sends data to a web application. The hardware device consists of different sensors which monitor different parameters and send the collected data on the web app platform which first registers the users and then registers devices for them so that they can monitor the chosen parameters in real-time, to see the crops’ health, view charts, and even receive alerts in case of an irregular data value.