IoT Agriculture: Plant monitoring

Increase momentum for IT agriculture

Until now, agriculture has been considered as a primary industry unrelated to IT.

In addition to the aging of farmers and the passing on of know-how, there is an increasing momentum to utilize IT for refinement from the perspective of improving productivity and maximizing profits from disease control.

The role of IoT

IoT plays an important role in IT-based agriculture. For example,

• Monitoring of growing environment in the field
• Monitoring of plant growth
• Cooperation with production management system

are effective.

As you can see by monitoring using sensors, even in one field, in places where the temperature is high or low, where it is sunny and where it is not, where fertilizer is sufficient and where it is not, etc. It is common that there is a lot of variation.

In addition, fields in different locations will have completely different growing environments and conditions.

Measure the temperature distribution of the field

The photo above is an example of a fixed-point observation of the temperature distribution using far-infrared thermography when conducting a field IoT demonstration experiment in an actual crop field.

As you can see from this, there are hot and cold places in the field. In other words, it can be said that the growing environment of crops in the field is not the same. In addition, since the obtained temperature is the surface temperature of the leaves, the growth state of the plant and the activity of photosynthesis will differ depending on the location.

In other words, local optimization and the use of IoT for local production for local consumption along the land and location will be very meaningful for those engaged in agriculture.

Agricultural productivity improvement and disease control using sensors

In this photo, we used far-infrared thermography, but in thermography, the result changes depending on the shooting position, so accurate information cannot be obtained unless the photo is taken from directly above.

In addition, since the only information that can be obtained is temperature, it is useful to install soil sensors, environmental sensors, sunshine sensors, wind direction and wind speed sensors, etc. everywhere in the field when monitoring fields and plants. It is recommended to get the information.

Combining this information to carry out environmental monitoring and precision agriculture is important for improving productivity and controlling diseases, and when data is accumulated, the know-how acquired in a certain field will be separated. There is a possibility that agricultural productivity can be greatly improved, such as by expanding to another fields.