IoT- Enabled soil moisture management for precision plant sprinkler system for organic farming

In daily operations related to farming, watering stands out as crucial yet labour-intensive task regardless of weather conditions. The traditional way of watering crops involves manual irrigation, which poses challenges such as inefficiency, labour intensity, and uneven water distribution that often results in overwatering in some areas leading to potential crop yield losses. It requires two important aspects: when and how much to water. With that, this project study aimed to provide an alternative way of irrigating crops and embrace automation to increase crop productivity, less water consumption, and reduce labour intensity. Farmers can benefit from automated watering systems to optimize irrigation practices. To address farming challenges, a microcontroller-based irrigation system with Arduino microcontroller, soil moisture sensors, relay modules, and water sprinkler was developed. This system aids in transitioning from traditional farming to digital farming, boosting productivity and allowing real-time monitoring via a mobile app. Additionally, it is integrated into a railing system to automate irrigation based on the crops' watering needs. It offers a solution to labor-intensive manual watering and farming and is claimed to be effective based on the evaluation results, which yielded strong agreement in functionality, effectiveness and efficiency, with scores of, 4.24, 4.17, and 4.1 respectively. It has the potential to be an innovation in the development of more eco-friendly and sustainable agricultural practices.