IoT-based Precision Monitoring of Horticultural Crops - A Case-study on Cabbage and Capsicum

Demand for food is increasing with the growing world population. Cultivable land however is decreasing by the day due to rapid urbanization, and farm-yield needs to increase to meet ever-increasing food-security needs. Rapid strides in Internet of Things (IoT) have made it possible to carry out a comprehensive monitoring of the farm at various levels to help achieve this while optimally utilizing essential resources. To have a highly granular view of the farm, we have deployed an IoT based precision farming system consisting of a cluster of devices measuring over 14 ambient parameters below the soil, at the crop level, and the ambient environment. The system has been integrated with our digital farming platform on the cloud that provides a flexible interface to gather sensor data from disparate sources and issues contextual advisory to the farm supervisor in order to carry out specific actions on the field. The setup has been used so far to monitor two horticultural crops, cabbage and capsicum that were suited to the agro-climatic zone of the deployment region, for the Rabi (Winter) season of 2017. We present our experiences with the work and learnings from the deployment over the season which led to a reduction in agri-input cost by 20% and improvement in yields by more than 10%.