Increasing Yield and Reducing the Cost of Cultivation of Asparagus with the Internet of Things

DOI: 10.14416/j.ind.tech.2022.12.004

Abstract

This research is the designing and constructing of a watering management system on a 6,760 square meter asparagus farming area using the Internet of Things approach to increase productivity, reduce cost, and prevent flooding as well. Processes in this study include utilizing multiple sensors such as soil moisture sensor, ambient humidity and temperature sensor, rainfall sensor and wind speed sensor, designing and developing a groundwater pump control system, a rainfall drainage pump control system, a water distribution control for a sprinkler system, and a plumbing system on the farm area using PVC pipe.  In addition, there is also the creation and development of an Arduino IDE script for communicating with the microcontroller, Node MCU ESP8266, with a 2.4 GHz WiFi chip. A NETPIE Cloud Server is utilized for controlling and displaying (Dashboard and Feed) multiple data to simultaneously inform farmers. In conclusion, results from 60 days of data collection suggest that the asparagus watering system which can regulate soil moisture using a sprinkler process controlled by the Internet of Things can promote more productivity than that of the conventional system on the same plantation area of 1 Rai.  Of this result, in comparison with the real plantation area by scaling up to 4.22 Rai with a production of 4 crops per year, the calculation shows that the best practice of the IoT system can increase productivity by 12.8% and reduce cost by 99,246 baht per year implying that the return period is only 1.04 year.