Smart Hydroponic Lettuce Farm using Internet of Things

Smart agriculture or smart farming is the application of Internet of Things to growing crops with the potential of saving labor and resources, more fine-grained control in watering and fertilization, and more accurate gathering of information about planting environment. In this research, we developed a Smart Hydroponic farm using Internet of Things technology to investigate its benefits comparing with regular hydroponics farm. Lettuce was chosen as the testing crop. Our smart farm can monitor the growing environment and adjusts nutrient solution, air temperature, and air humidity according to the situation automatically. The results show that lettuces from smart farm has on the average around 36.59% higher weight, 17.2% more leaf, and 13.9% larger stem diameter than ones from a regular farm. The nitrate content of Smart farm lettuces is also 8.24% better.