The internet of things in agriculture

Purpose and goal

Over the course of the last century, the need for finding new, more efficient, and sustainable methods of agricultural cultivation and food production has become more critical. To facilitate this process, we are designing, building, and evaluating a system for precision agriculture which provides the farmers with useful data about the soil, the water supply and the general condition of their fields in a user friendly, easily accessible way our system aims to make cultivation and irrigation more efficient.

Results and expected effects

In this project, we have presented a solution for monitoring agricultural environments. The system can act as an early warning system for upcoming threats, a monitoring system constantly reporting on the status of farmland or livestock or as a recommendation system for prospective farmers. We claim that such a system is relevant in the network society and that there is sufficient technical knowledge (software and hardware components, standardized network protocols) to render its implementation not only feasible, but also cost effective.

Approach and implementation

We substantiate our claims through a review of already-existing monitoring technologies including network protocols, open-source software and cheap hardware components which we use for our implementation and through a background study on the business value of such a system, based on interviews with potential users. A prototype system is presented, demonstrating basic functionality for retrieving data from sensors, relaying this data through a gateway and storing, analyzing the data on a server. Subsequently, the results are presented to users via a web interface.