Soil Nutrient Analysis using Colorimetry Method

In most parts of the world, agriculture is an important source of livelihood. This entails hard work, but it contributes to the nation’s food safety and health. The harvest majorly depends on soil fertility, moisture level and also the level of fertilizers used. Time and distance are the major factors that limits farmers in performing the laboratory analysis of nutrients. Due to this inconvenience caused, nutrient testing is not performed regularly, which results the soil to lose its fertility. Using the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) a system is proposed which adopts precision agriculture in order to overcome such drawbacks and to remotely monitor the soil characteristics like soil moisture and its nutrients. Awareness about the quantity of nutrients present in the soil is essential to ensure optimum usage of fertilizers and constant monitoring of irrigation is also required for better productivity. The sensors are integrated with arduino microcontroller and the values obtained from the sensors are transmitted to the cloud and displayed in a mobile application. The proposed IoT based software system has the intelligence to measure the moisture level and quantity of the nutrients using colorimetry which improves the quality of the soil and ensures optimum growth of the crop.