Smart Agriculture

Description

In crop production, small changes in soil conditions can have significant impacts on production quality. Ground conditions retaining too much water or not enough puts stress on the crops and traditional uniform watering methods will leave some areas too wet or too dry.

Tradition methods also require farmers to waste valuable time and fuel driving to visit and physically operate irrigation block valves. By automating the process with smart actuators controlled through the cloud and using pre-scheduled irrigation, farmers can utilise true remote automated irrigation.

Another pain point is ensuring the right pressure within irrigation systems to ensure that all irrigation systems are working and adequately delivering the right amount of water.

With informed irrigation, growers can make decisions based on in-field data, helping to eliminate guesswork and improve growing practices.

The primary objective is to:

Solution

The Waterbit solution is a new class of telemetry and irrigation control that is energy-efficient, maintenance-free, multi-function and ultra-lower power.

With cloud-connected, soil sensors in disparate areas operators can know precisely which areas require water levels adjusting in near real-time and maintain a better balance of water levels across all blocks. Collecting soil moisture, field data, and controlling valves and actuators, has never been easier.

It simplifies sensor data collection and automatically controls valves and actuators, plus it does all of this while staying out of the way during of machinery during field operations with low-profile hardware. The goal is to capture data, improve service quality and reduce costs.

Key parameters the WaterBit solution monitors and automates:

• soil moisture
• water pressure
• temperature
• humidity
• biometric pressure
• flow meters

Application

1. A farm is typically divided up into area blocks. Pre-configured WaterBit Carbon sensors, WaterBit Pressure sensors and WaterBit Block Valve Controllers are installed at block and micro block level to monitor soil parameters, irrigation infrastructure water pressure and automatic valves.
2. The sensors periodically monitor all configured parameters and transmit the encrypted data via LoRaWAN® radio transmission to a pre-configured LoRaWAN® solar powered gateway within proximity.
3. The gateway listens for and receives radio transmissions from the WaterBit sensors and using an AT&T cellular backhaul the gateway forwards the encrypted data to the cloud LORIOT network server.
4. The received encrypted data is authenticated, and the network server routes the payload via API to the WaterBit dashboard for analysis and reporting.
5. The received encrypted data is authenticated, and the network server routes the payload via API to the WaterBit dashboard for analysis and reporting.
6. ISensor data is analysed in the WaterBit cloud application, and pre-determined parameters and alerts can be acted upon and automated. Block values are automatically opened/closed at the required locations.
7. The farmers also have easy access to the mobile WaterBit App and dashboard for the visualised data enabling them to make on the spot, instant decisions based on valuable quantitative and qualitative data.