Precision Crop Monitoring with Affordable IoT: Experiences with Okra

Abstract

With the growing population and rapidly increasing demand for food production, delivering greater yields with finite and often small cultivable lands is a demanding ask from farmers. Precision crop monitoring with Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to dramatically impact and digitally revolutionize the farming ecosystem. Especially keeping the needs of developing regions in view, we have developed a reliable and affordable IoT framework to cater to pressing needs of the farmer. A deployment based on the framework was used to monitor Okra during the Kharif (July–October) season of 2018–19. We present our experiences, learnings and results from the season which significantly enriched our decision support system while bringing over 10% improvement in yields.