High-efficiency Low-cost Smart IoT Agriculture Irrigation, Soil's Fertility and Moisture Controlling System

The world's population increased exponentially and more food is required to support the growing population. However, the existing agriculture solutions are too costly for small-scale farmers. This has motivated us to design a Smart IoT Agriculture System (SIAS) to monitor and control the soil's moisture and fertility levels. SIAS is a low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) solution that used an online app to monitor and control water consumption and the soil's fertility level. ESP8266 microcontroller is used in SIAS to automatically control the irrigation system that consists of a soil moisture sensor, thermal probe, and water pump. The pH sensor is used to monitor the soil's fertility level. The data collected from the IoT sensors are uploaded to the ThingSpeak cloud database through WiFi. Blynk app is used to control the SIAS on the smartphone. The prototype development, implementation details and the optimal operation condition of SIAS are reported in this paper. SIAS with a total cost of USD46 is proven to have lower water consumption (85% lower), real-time monitoring of the soil's fertility and a better crop growth rate compared to the existing conventional watering timer system.