Monitoring and accelerating plant growth using IoT and Hydroponics
Abhishek Kumar, P. Savaridassan
Abstract
Growing plants without soil is known as hydroponics, and it is particularly helpful in places with little space and bad weather. A novel method of growing plants without soil in an inert medium is called hydroponics. By avoiding pesticides and other substances that degrade soil and land quality, hydroponics enables farmers to conserve water while enhancing crop quality. Due to its high efficiency and role as an environmentally benign substitute for soil culture, it has the ability to close the gap left by India’s low agricultural productivity. This farming process has leveraged several new technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), making integration of intelligent management and real-time data monitoring and collection systems possible. This farming process also allows for a greater degree of automation and refinement in the control process of the hydroponic systems. Via this paper, we have discussed the development of a hydroponic subsystem that leverages agents for cloud-based monitoring, data collection, and storage for future analysis and heuristics. This paper presents an intuitive and low-cost approach to monitoring and accelerating plant growth based on Hydroponics and IoT with tools such as automated environment parameter monitoring and error rectification, sub-second streaming of telemetry from ground units to cloud servers and allowing users to access the status of the plant or system of plants being monitored as a plant health index from anywhere in the world, via a mobile application. The end goal of this paper is to understand the benefits one obtains by adopting a Hydroponics based cultivation system, which would show up as lower water consumption, minimal space usage, increased control over nutrients being introduced, and much more effective protection against pests and diseases when coupled with the feature of emphasizing each plant genus being cultivated via plant profile templates. This approach will not only revolutionize the millennial approach to farming but also act as a stepping stone in the direction of complete automation in farming.