An autonomous irrigation system framework for precision agriculture in Punjab, India

Over the past few years, the demand for freshwater supply has been escalated many folds with the increasing food demand of a fast-growing population. Irrigation is one of the most water-intensive agricultural activities in the world. Globally, about 40% of irrigation water is supplied from groundwater and in India it is expected to be over 50%. Moreover, the impact of climate change on agriculture and water resources has become a global concern and starting to have social and economic effects worldwide. Efficient agricultural practices are essential to increasing farm profitability, and reducing water consumption can be achieved by real-time monitoring of water needs. The recent progress of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has a key role in future smart farming by enabling automated operations with minimum human intervention. This paper proposes an IoT-based smart framework that can monitor and control the irrigation in real time precisely. The climate data-based methodology is used to estimate the tentative amount of water required for irrigation in the agriculture test field through CROPWAT 8.0. Based on the simulated result the hardware module is programmed to deliver the required amount water for irrigation. The proposed module works on long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) technology and controls the irrigation requirement by monitoring the soil moisture contents through the low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) communication system. The functionality of the proposed prototype is tested in real fields and results collected through experimental validation show that the proposed irrigation system is found to save approximately 9% and 11% of the water used for rice and wheat farming, respectively. The hardware platform is affordable and easy to implement a smart irrigation management system in medium and small fields.