An Intelligent Agro-Cloud Advisory System for Smart Irrigation

Though agriculture is considered as the backbone of India, still farmers are struggling a lot to get profit due to water scarcity, storms, flooding, drought, etc. Moreover, farmers are not adopting modern technologies due to lack of awareness, limited land size, and expenses. The proposed agro-cloud advisory system focuses on one of the essential agricultural practices namely irrigation. Crop fields should be watered regularly for healthy crop growth.  Water holding capacity differs from soil to soil. Clay soil grips higher water content than sandy soil. Measurement of water quality depends on the salt contents and their quantity in water. The irrigation timing and frequency differ from soil to soil, crop to crop, and season to season. Based on the availability of water sources like wells, tube wells, canals, lakes, rivers, and the cost, any one of the traditional methods or modern irrigation methods are employed in the field. But modern irrigation methods use water efficiently with less wastage. The proposed intelligent advisory system consists of the three main components namely i) Data collection Layer ii) Data processing Layer and iii) User interface Layer. The data collection layer gathers data from devices like sensors, meters, cameras, drones, and satellite data. In the data processing layer, the data collected from layer1 is stored & processed in a cloud. A feed forward multi layer neural network is employed to select the appropriate irrigation method like drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation based on the type of crop, soil, source of water, rainfall, labor cost. The user interface layer provides the perspective irrigation guidelines to the farmers through notification messages, graphical user interfaces (GUI), mobile applications. The devised cloud-based smart irrigation system supports the farmers to control the functions of irrigation from remote systems and also reduces the wastage of water, labor cost, and conserving energy.