Development of IoT-Based Remote Monitoring Module for Greenhouse Environment to Facilitate Crop Growth Data Analysis

As the shortage of agricultural population is becoming an issue, services that remotely monitor the agricultural environment using IoT are being offered in the market.However, small-and medium-scale private farmers are unable to purchase or rent IoT equipment and monitoring tools because they have to spend their budgets on maintenance and utilities in greenhouses to support environmental management, and the construction of data infrastructure has not been widely adopted.Therefore, in this experiment, we developed an agricultural IoT that can be provided to medium and small farmers, and a module that enables collection, accumulation, and visualization of time-series data acquired from sensors.The module provides an architecture that includes multiple sensing, networking, processing, and visualization applications to keep deployment and management costs low.To demonstrate its feasibility, the proposed IoT system was built, experimentally tested, and verified in a greenhouse in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto, Japan, by intermittently monitoring temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, solar radiation, and soil moisture content in the greenhouse for two years.The results obtained confirm that the proposed IoT remote monitoring module facilitates farmers to monitor the growing environment of their crops and enables them to improve their productivity by progressively increasing their technology level.