Use of Soil Moisture Sensor for Efficient Irrigation in Smart Agriculture
Subhas Adak *
Agricultural Training Centre & SAMETI-West Bengal, Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama, Narendrapur, Kolkata-700103, India.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The demand for water is gradually increasing to quench the agricultural thirst. The uncertainty of timely rainfall, irrigation has become the important source of adding water to the soil to grow crop. Conventional methods of water application incur poor irrigation efficiency and high wastage of this precious natural resource. The study was carried out to evaluate the use of soil moisture sensors (SMS) for efficient irrigation in smart agriculture. It was observed that 5.53 times more water requirement for flood method without SMS whereas it was only 3.51 times more water required for SMS-enabled plot than its basic irrigation water requirement (3246l/p). The flood method deployed without SMS, the irrigation efficiency was very poor (25.10%) whereas drip method with SMS resulted the highest IE (89.94%). Considerable amount (50-85%) of water was saved from wastage when SMS was used to determine the water content of the soil. The SMS-enabled plot produced good average weight of each guava. The fruits harvested from the plants with SMS were priced higher than the others. Considering the cost of devices including sensors, water carrying channels and others, the benefit-cost ratio increased with the SMS and modern irrigation techniques. The drip irrigation with SMS demonstrated the highest B-C ratio (2.41). The findings suggested that the sensor enabled irrigation system saved wastage of water and led to the efficient uses of water for better crop production.
Keywords: Smart agriculture, soil moisture sensor, irrigation efficiency, precision agriculture, precision irrigation