Soil Monitoring for Agriculture Activity using Low Power Wide Area Network

Abstract

The new Covid-19 pandemic is affecting many economic sectors, such as the agricultural industry. The farmers faced many challenging constraints during the pandemic due to the enforcement of the Movement Control Order (MCO), resulting the unproductive crops. This paper proposed smart agriculture adopted with the Internet of Things (IoT) and Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technology to be one of the possible solutions for the problems. Early precautions will minimize unproductive crops by monitoring the soil for healthy crops by monitoring the moisture and the pH level of the soil in real time. In this paper, a soil monitoring system using (Long-range) LoRa technology as one of the solutions for LPWAN to monitor the soil for agriculture has been set up. The soil moisture and pH sensors used to monitor the condition of the soil. The monitoring system uses LoRa as the communication network for the two sensors integrated into the Arduino Uno microcontroller as the transmitter and a receiver to monitor the status of the soil. This project enables the user to monitor the soil conditions and control the watering of the crops. The result concludes that this system shows 100% accuracy of the packet data received by the receiver, where the location of transmitter to the receiver was 1.4 meters apart.