Smart Soil Property Analysis Using IoT: A Case Study Implementation in Backyard Gardening

Crop growth and the agricultural ecosystem are both affected by inappropriate soil fertility ranges. Soil fertility management practices help to efficient use of fertilizer and organic compost and selecting appropriate crops based on soil conditions. But, farmers randomly applied fertilizers without analysing their soil nutrients status. These unbalanced agrochemical inputs contaminate agricultural resources. Laboratory soil analysis procedures help to track soil fertility status. However, the laboratory soil analysis practices are insufficient for Indian farmers. Recent research and development show an On-field soil property monitoring system. Furthermore, internet-based soil fertility monitoring aids farmers in increasing productivity and optimizing resources. This paper presents the prototype based on a smart soil fertility prediction system based on the Internet of Things (IoT). The prototype model was tested and analysed on home gardening application and monitoring the spinach crop growth. This soil fertility prediction system encourages cost-effective direct field measurement in agriculture. To test the accuracy of the prototype, the sensor result was compared with the laboratory analysis result. For soil pH measurements the sensor result is 6 and the laboratory test result is 6.7. similarly, for soil EC measurement the sensor value is 0.48 and the laboratory result is 0.64. The soil pH and EC comparison results show that only a slight variation is present between the sensor and laboratory value i.e for pH 0.7 % and EC 0.16% difference are present. The analysed result shows that the proposed prototype model is efficient for on-field monitoring in gardening. Further, the measured data are stored in the cloudMQTT server, and they can be utilized for ago decision-making applications.