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Water is becoming scarcer. The unmonitored control and the extensive use of fossil fuel in water-table pumping for irrigation exacerbate global warming and harm the environment. Along with the rapid population growth and the concomitant increase in the demand for food, optimal usage of water-table and energy is becoming a must and indispensable for sustainable agriculture. In this context, Smart Agriculture (SA) is emerging as a promising field that leverages ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to optimize resources’ usage while enhancing crops’ yields. In this paper, we present an integral SA solution that leverages cost-effectiveness. Commercial solutions are costly and thus become impossible to adopt by small and medium farmers. Our solution revolves around three main axes: 1. Smart Water Metering promotes optimal usage and conservation of water-table (a.k.a., groundwater) via real-time data collection and monitoring using a Cloud-based IoT (Internet of Things) system; 2. Renewable-Energy integration promotes energy-efficient agriculture by reducing reliance on fossil fuels in water-table pumping, and 3. Smart Irrigation to promote good crops quality and quantity without harming the soil and the water-table ecosystems. Our solution has been deployed and tested in a real-world Smart Farm testbed. The results have shown that the adoption of our SA system reduces the amount of water consumption (with a traditional irrigation system) up to 71.8%. Finally, our solution is open-source and can be easily adopted and adapted by other researchers to promote the setting of a dedicated Cloud-based platform for water-table usage, especially in arid and sub-Saharan countries.
Et-taibi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.