Development, Field Testing and Economic Evaluation of Automatic Irrigation System

Abstract

Sensor-based automated irrigation scheduling reduces the water losses, and applies precise quantities of water as per the crop water requirements, thereby improving the water use efficiency of irrigation systems. An automatic irrigation system (AIS) comprising of controller (raspberry pi), dual probe conductance-based soil moisture sensors and liquid crystal display it should read as liquid crystal display (LCD) LCD screen was developed to automate sprinkler irrigation system. The controller of the system was programmed using python programming language to control the solenoid valve and the motor on the basis of field-sensed soil moisture data. Field capacity and 50 % depletion of available soil moisture content were set as the upper and lower limits of soil moisture for switching the motor to ‘OFF’ or ‘ON’ condition, respectively. The developed system was compared with manual sprinkler irrigation for cabbage as indicator crop. Over the crop growing season, the moisture content under AIS was in the range of 0-10 % of soil moisture, indicating better accuracy of the AIS in sensing the water content in the crop root zone. The total cost of the AIS for 1 ha area was ₹ 16,058/-. The benefit-cost ratio of AIS was higher (2.59) as against manual irrigation (2.16), for cabbage.