IoT-based Smart Irrigation System for Solanum Melongena or Eggplant using Evapotranspiration with Penman-Monteith Equation

Abstract

Agriculture is the art and science of gardening, achieving optimal soil conditions, and is responsible for most of the world's production of crops. Thus, with agriculture comes the importance of irrigation. Today, climate change has been one of the most defining concerns for the world's agricultural sector, producing resource problems, particularly water scarcity. By using smart irrigation systems, agricultural producers are supported as it provides energy efficiency and reduced water consumption without compromising the quality of the plants. A smart irrigation system is created in this study to automatically water plants depending on Evapotranspiration, using the Penman-Monteith equation along with the water postponement algorithm. The average crop coefficient obtained throughout the stages of the eggplant is 97.08%, identical to the crop coefficient of eggplant provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) by the United Nations (UN). The water consumption of the smart irrigation system proves that it has reduced 74.01% of water consumption compared to the traditional shows that there is a significant difference between the amount of water consumption of the two setups. As to the plant parameters, the plant's height, the number of leaves, and crop length show no significant difference in the smart and traditional setup.