Water Conservation using IoT

The Problem

Rice is a staple food for roughly 50% of the world’s population. and nearly 90% of the rice is produced in Asian countries. Worldwide, agriculture accounts for 70% of all water consumption, far more than the 20% for industry and the 10% for domestic use. As water is needed throughout the rice-growing season, paddy fields altogether consume up to 90% of the total water used for irrigation in Asia. My country Bangladesh is in 4th position on rice production (35% of world production). In Bangladesh farmers use 3,300 liters of water for producing 1 kg of paddy. According to Ministry of Agriculture country are misusing some 800 liters of water in producing each kilogram of paddy. Even the situation is worse in India. According to Indian Research Institute farmers use on an average 15,000 liters to produce one kg of paddy. According to BADC more than 75% of the irrigation water is groundwater and 65% of this water is misusing.

Our Proposal

We want to solve the problem developing an IoT and AI based Irrigation System. The system will come with hardware unit and phone application. i. The sensor node: This unit will be a solar powered wireless device to measure moisture level and temperature of soil. It will send sensor data to a controller unit using LoRaWAN. It will be a lowcost unit and a land can have several units placed in different location. ii. The controller unit: This unit will communicate with sensor node, mobile application, weather server and cloud server. Sensor node will provide the soil condition of a land. It will know rice species, amount of land and planting date form the apps. It will also collect the weather data (like chance of raining) from weather server. From the cloud server it will collect the required amount water data for a specific species of a specific age. Base on sensor data, weather forecast, species, and age controller will determine either field requires water or not. It will also calculate the amount of water required. iii. Phone apps: Farmer will provide the necessary information of his filed (eg. amount of land, species of rice, and date of planting) to the system through apps. iv. Water pump and pipeline: System will collect and distribute water to lands according to control signal. Signal will come from main controller. Every land will be connected to central pipeline with separate valve and control system will operate valve wirelessly according water requirement.

We Assume that...

1. A GSM network is available in the region

2. Sunlight is available for 4-5 hours

Constraints to Overcome

The main technology used in this project is the low-power wide-area network (LPWAN). It is a relatively new technology. Without a low power long-range wireless network, this system will be very expensive and power-hungry. Besides, the sensors used in such a system should not be very expensive because each land may be required multiple sensor devices. Nowadays highly accurate moisture and temperature sensors are available at a good price which was expensive a few years ago. Most of the farmers in the Asian country are not capable to spend a big amount on such a system. So to make the system usable it should be cheap and easy to use (automatic). LPWAN, low price sensor, solar photovoltaic and IoT advancement make it possible to develop the system at an affordable price.

Current Work

For the next few months, we are going to finalize the design of the sensor unit (schematic, pcb, 3D model etc.).

Current Needs

Funding and lab support will be required.