Towards Efficient Irrigation Management With Solar-Powered Wireless Soil Moisture Sensors and Real-Time Monitoring Capability

Judicious use of water for irrigated agriculture is going to be paramount for sustainable intensification to meet the food demands within the realistic constraints of available land, water, and other resources. Water and nutrient use efficiency are the key goals of the ongoing efforts in smart agriculture led by the primary author at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES). Recently a subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) system has been installed on a 15-acre farm at UMES. The SDI system has 20 zones for which the user can activate valves to turn the water on and off in the drip lines. In this paper, we will report the preliminary efforts in deploying a solar-powered wireless solar-powered soil moisture sensor network in the field. The network uses a cellular gateway to transfer the field data to the web. The data can be viewed in real-time on the web. The installation details and conditioning of the sensors will be highlighted. The smart farming research team is also looking into installing compatible rain gauges in the field and instrumenting the set-up for automated activation of the valves to turn the water on and off in the drip lines based on soil moisture readings. Online real-time monitoring capability proved useful for demonstrating the set-up to undergraduate students in the online junior level "Instrumentation course (ENGE 380)" offered by the author in fall 2020 using screen sharing capability of the Blackboard Learning Management System (BLMS). Two students attending the class have been involved in supporting a graduate student for the preliminary field deployment efforts outlined in the paper. It is anticipated the exposure will generate interest among other undergraduate students to participate in the extensive field instrumentation efforts in the ongoing smart agriculture program at UMES. In addition to exposure to smart agriculture field instrumentation, the students in ENGE 380 class also got hands-on experience with sensors and instrumentations take-home kit based on Arduino-microprocessor board. At the time of writing this paper soil moisture and temperature data has been collected for over two weeks from more for more than three dozen sensors that have been deployed in the field in different zones of the 15-acre field for a preliminary trial. The field which uses corn, soybean, and wheat rotation, was growing soybean during the preliminary trial reported here. A six-band multispectral camera that simultaneously images in the visible, near infra-red, and thermal bands have also been flown on a DJI Inspire II drone to collect aerial imagery.