Soil Health Monitoring System

Abstract

As in India agriculture provides employment opportunities for rural people on a large scale. It is an important source of livelihood and still our agriculture sector is facing challenges. And one of those challenges is productivity of land. Typically, collecting data from the field involves quite a bit of time. Currently, there is no such machine which can automatically test all required data. It is measured by collecting samples, sending to a lab, waiting days or weeks, and then only receiving a snapshot and report of the condition of field from that one day. As this is time consuming process and due to the lack of information about the nutrients present in soil farmers are not able to decide about crop, fertilizer and irrigation that would be best suited to the soil. Hence we need a portable device which can analyze the soil nutrients on real time basis. This research focuses on developing a comprehensive soil probe measuring everything from soil macronutrients (Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K)) to soil moisture, pH and soil humidity. This research comprises of an electronic device which would detect macronutrients with the help of three LEDs as light source and a LDR as a light detector. The wavelength of LEDs is chosen to fit the absorption band of each nutrient. The nutrient absorbs the light from LED and the LDR convert the remaining light that is reflected by reflector to current. The system utilizes a microcontroller for data acquisition therefore the output from the transducer is converted into a digital display reading and it involves the concept of IOT as a webpage is included in it for review and analysis of all the data collected by the farmer ,in both Hindi and English with some suggestions.