Keywords: Smart Farming, IoT, Project Management, GANTT chart, PERT diagram
Concept and approach:
• The IoT Technology applied to agriculture provides magnificent benefits to farmers. Thanks to this technology, it is possible to use natural resources more efficiently and to know the best moment of sowing, irrigating, fertilizing, and harvesting.
• The main purpose of this agricultural IoT project is to develop an application based on IoT technology that provides efficiency, sustainability, optimization of the usage of natural resources, and traceability.
• Day by day, the agricultural sector has been facing problems coming from global warming. Temperature, rainfall, sunlight, evaporation, and wind are the most important factors that affect the quality of crops, production, and biology cycles. Knowing or predicting these parameters in advance provides the farmers great advantages and helps them to determine the best moment of sowing, irrigating, fertilizing, and harvesting.
• The nodes will be selected in the place determined in advance. IoT measurement system that does not need any action coming from the user will be deployed in these nodes. Collected data will be sent to the cloud via 4G every hour. In the cloud, it is possible to monitor and manage the device condition, and the data will be accessible and extracted. The precious extracted data will be monitored by using an application so farmers can efficiently make decisions based on real-time measured data.
• The project looks for a smart method that utilizes modern agriculture techniques and IoT technology. After the project is actualized, not only the quality and quantity of crops will be evaluated but also the environmental effects will be taken into account.
• The usage of collected data from the nodes via IoT technology will provide farmers the possibility of expected harvest at the beginning of the process.
• Natural resources will be used more efficiently, and unnecessary consumption of these resources will be eliminated so the project will make a positive contribution to action on global warming.
• The amount of manpower will be reduced; therefore, there will be savings of energy, time, and money.
• In the short period, the advantages of the project will be proved, and the drawbacks of it will be counteracted as much as possible so the system will be improved.
• In the long period, the usage of the system among farmers will be widespread and the positive effects of the system on the Earth will be observed.
• The establishment of the system in a large area and communication between the nodes and cloud will be the main struggles to be overcome in the first phase.
2.2 Measures to maximize the impact
• The system will be introduced and presented to the public by attending agricultural fairs and seminars at universities.
• The collected data like humidity, atmospheric pressure, soil moisture, soil temperature, wind direction, and speed and state of crops during sowing, irrigating, fertilizing, and harvesting phases will be shared on the user application. In any phase, the users will be able to observe these kinds of data as well as share their experiences with each other.
• To provide security, double password confirmation will be required to enter the application successfully.
• As taking the communication information of the participants in the agricultural fairs and seminars, the results will be shared. At the same time, participants can find beneficial information in the part of the application that is separated for the thoughts and comments coming from users.
Tables:
Table 3.1a: List of work packages
Gantt Chart: