Field Agronomic Condition Test (F.A.C.T.) Environmental sensing: The Future of Agricultural and Conservation IOT

Abstract

Agriculture faces a large volume of issues in the future that include climate change, growing population, and resource allocation. In addition, soil macronutrients tracking along with land management has always been a challenging field. Since, the macronutrients combined with soil pH, soil moisture, light intensity, air temperature and humidity steers the crop growth, it is imperative to track and log these data points to provide optimal crop growth conditions. In the past, there has been a lack of devices that could track soil conditions for a farmer resulting in non-optimal crop growth. In this paper we propose the Field Agronomic Condition Testing (F.A.C.T) that aids the farmers to test and log soil conditions. F.A.C.T combines agriculture and computer science under the umbrella of IoT (Internet of Things) in order to collect environmental data for agricultural or conservation land improvement across the globe. This device was developed using Raspberry Pi 3, a credit card sized computer, Elegoo Uno microcontrollers, and multiple sensors that collect data on light intensity, soil Ph, soil moisture, air temperature, and humidity. No device exists that can take these readings and present the data in this fashion. Data collection is initiated by either hard buttons on the device or by applications on Raspberry Pi that may be accessed by any device that can connect to the VNC viewer. Data may be collected in all areas using this method. This data is sent via web connection to the AWS (Amazon Web Service) cloud where data is provided in a graph. The data can be used to influence irrigation, crop choice, animal grazing, and assist land stewardship.