Agriculture monitoring

Abstract

The world agriculture has experienced several stages of development. It started from the primitive agriculture stage, where human was using stoneware for farming, to traditional agriculture stage, where human started to invent and produce ironwood tools for farming, and now we reach the modern agriculture stage, where information and knowledge are applied in farming activities. Currently, concepts such as precision agriculture (De Baerdemaeker 2001), digital agriculture (Tang 2002), and agroinformatics start to prevail. The application of wireless sensor network (WSN) (Akyildiz 2002) is contributing toward the realisation of those agriculture concepts. WSN consists of many small and inexpensive nodes. Each of the nodes consists of a simple processor that is equipped with a wireless transceiver and a number of state-of-the-art sensors. Together with its self-organised networking capability it is a suitable candidate for agricultural monitoring. The sensor nodes can sense the environmental changes using a variety of physical, chemical and biological sensors. In agricultural monitoring using wireless sensor nodes, readings from wireless sensor nodes located at different places of a farm will be collected and forwarded to a central server. At the server, the sensor data will be processed and compiled into useful information. This information can then be sent to the farmers through Internet or cellular network. With this technology, farmers can monitor their farm conditions without having to be physically present there. In addition, through the use of appropriate information technology, suitable course of action may be recommended. In many places of the world, the size of a farm can be as large as several hundred acres. Different portions of the farm may have different microclimates. The traditional way of monitoring a large-scale farm requires a lot of human power. The emergence of WSN applications will enable the farming communities to interact closely with their plants or livestock and gives timely solution to their problems. A number of WSN applications for agriculture have been implemented worldwide. For example in Canada, Intel Research Laboratory and Agriculture & Agri- Food Canada are using WSN to measure the environmental conditions to help protecting their grapes from frost damage (Burrell 2004). They are also analyzing long-term data of the sensors in order to identify how to harvest the grapes more productively and reduce the use of pesticides and fungicides. Another example is the recent research carried out by LOFAR-Agro Consortium (Goense 2005) in Netherlands, in which wireless sensor nodes are used to measure the microclimate in potato crops. The detailed information compiled from the sensor readings will be used to improve the knowledge on how to counteract the Phytophtora Infestans fungous disease. Due to the difficulty in obtaining accurate microclimate information under the canopy of the potato crop using remote sensing, WSN is chosen. Agriculture includes the growing of crops (including grains, fruits, vegetables, flowers, and plants), keeping of livestock, and dairy farming. For different types of agricultural activities, different environmental parameters need to be monitored. Crops are sensitive to weather and environmental changes. Production of crops is thus influenced by those changes. For livestock, the health conditions of the animals are much correlated with the farm environment. In addition, any disease that strikes a particular animal may spread to the whole farm and causes a huge loss. For example, the Bird Flu that occurred in many Asian countries in 2005 has caused losses of million of dollars (Reed Business Information Ltd. 2005). Dairy farming needs clean environment, any minor changes will affect the yield of dairy production. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.