In agriculture, irrigation is a crucial component of crop production. Trinidad and Tobago faces two seasons: "dry" and
"rainy" seasons. In the dry season rainfall is scarce and irrigation must take place in order to provide plants with the necessary moisture
required for successful growth. In the rainy season there is excessive rainfall which may result in waterlogging of soil. Many farmers
however apply irrigation without measure of the actual amount of water applied and the optimum requirements for plant growth. This
may lead to over-irrigation or under-irrigation. Over-irrigation and under-irrigation introduce many negative consequences to the farming
practice, all resulting in financial loss to the farmers and their livelihoods. This paper entails the actual development of a front-interface
of a Smart Agricultural Irrigation Monitor to aid crop production in Trinidad and Tobago. In the rainy season excessive rainfall may
result in too much moisture being applied to land so this system will also be capable of indicating to administrator the status of soil
moisture during rainfall.
Published In:IJCAT Journal Volume 6, Issue 9
Date of Publication : September 2019
Pages : 52-63
Figures :07
Tables :03
Marcus Lloyde George :
Department of Electrical Engineering , Ballarpur institute of technology,
received the Bsc degree in Electrical and
Computer Engineering from the University of the West Indies, St.
Augustine in 2007, his MPhil degree in Electrical and Computer
Engineering from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
in 2011 and his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer
Engineering from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
in 2019. He is the author of several academic books. His research
engineering interest include the business administration, strategic
planning and management, engineering education, formal
specification, modelling and verification, field programmable
architectures, intelligent electronic instrumentation and biomedical
engineering.
Simeon Ramjit :
received the Bsc degree in Electrical and
Computer Engineering from the University of the West Indies, St.
Augustine in 2017 and was a former research student of Marcus
Lloyde George.
This paper entailed the actual development of a frontinterface
of a Smart Agricultural Irrigation Monitor to
benefit crop production in Trinidad and Tobago. In the
rainy season excessive rainfall may result in too much
moisture being applied to land so this system will also be
capable of indicating to administrator the status of soil
moisture during rainfall. The developed system was able to
accept user values and generate the appropriate warning
messages when the comparison was done between the realtime
value and the threshold. The interface was also able to
activate any existing actuation system by manipulating an
actuation signal until the soil moisture returned to an
acceptable range. This system ensures that crops will
experience their optimum moisture conditions. The system
can be further upgraded to incorporate the regulation of
other parameters such as soil PH and soil nutrition. Finally,
the system can be upgraded to incorporate flood
monitoring capabilities which will inform the CAT of the
imminence of flooding on the parcels of land under crop
production. Without doubt this system will be invaluable to
farmers in Africa nations and can possibly reduce
production cost by minimizing wastage of water supplies
while guaranteeing that crops experience optimum
moisture conditions.
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