IoT-Enabled Smart Irrigation System for Climate-Resilient and Water-Efficient Farming

Abstract

The lack of water, unpredictability of rainfall patterns and climatic variability has greatly impacted the agricultural productivity and sustainable water management across the globe. Traditional irrigation systems are usually based on manual timetabling and uncontrolled water flow which leads to overuse of water, less output on crops and a lack of efficient use of farming resources. This paper is a proposed IoT-based smart irrigation system to enable climate resistant and water efficient agriculture by being able to monitor the environment in real time and control the irrigation system automatically. The suggested framework is a combination of the following components: soil moisture, temperature and humidity, wireless communication module, cloud-assisted monitoring platform, and intelligent irrigation decision making built on a single precision agriculture infrastructure. Data gathered in the fields on environmental aspects is constantly processed to work out the irrigation needs in a dynamic manner based on crop and climatic conditions. The system that has been developed allows automatic delivery of water, remote control, and adaptive irrigation of farms to achieve sustainable farming activities. The prototype agricultural environment was mathematically assessed with different conditions of the environment. The outcomes established that there were significant changes in the efficiency of irrigation, sensing, response and conservation of water as opposed to the traditional irrigation methods. The proposed framework was 94.2% efficient in terms of irrigation and the water consumption was cut by around 31.7%. The strength, reliability and operational stability of the developed system were statistically validated by performing cross-validation analysis. The suggested IoT-based irrigation system can play a critical role in achieving sustainable agriculture, precision farming, climate change adaptive farming and smart agricultural resource management in environments where water is limited.