Smart Farming has become the main trend in Agriculture sector. According to the FAO, by 2050 food production may increase a 70% to feed 9.6 billion people. As we have reported in our our Smart Agriculture white paper, food and agricultural companies are increasing investments daily to integrate IoT solutions in some of their processes to cut down costs, to increase quality and quantity of the harvesting and also to ease some routine activities of farmers. It is essential to guarantee production and competitiveness.
Lembo, Colombia
Red Tecnoparque Colombia is part of the technical innovative program Sennova from SENA Regional Risaralda, the Colombian National Service for Learning, which aim is to accelerate the development of I+D+i projects in the countries. To improve productivity, the organisation has deployed a wireless sensors network with Libelium technology to monitor plantain crops in Lembo area, in Santa Rosa de Cabal region. The project has been carried out by students from different organisations linked to SENA.
Waspmote Plug & Sense! Smart Agriculture in banana crop
High accuracy monitoring in crops
Plantain crop has special significance for Colombian economy. It represents 9,69% of the agricultural production value and its annual production is estimated to be around 3
According to Colombian Consolidated Report of Exports published on May 2016, the total amount of banana exports between January and May is estimated in 433.454.622 USD which supposes 11,5% more than
Crop flood,
Improving crop conditions will increase the economic relevance of banana production in Colombia. For this reason, Red Tecnoparque Colombia has selected Libelium Waspmote Plug & Sense! Sensor Platform to develop a Smart Farming project with remote sensors. Plantain crops
- Waspmote Plug & Sense! Smart Agriculture:
- Digital Humidity & Temperature
- Soil moisture.
- Soil temperature.
- Trunk diameter.
- Fruit diameter.
- Pluviometer.
- Solar radiation.
- Waspmote Plug & Sense! Smart Environment:
- Ammonia (NH3)
Monitoring these parameters, Redcom Tecnoparque is remotely supervising ambient and agronomic variations to investigate new banana varieties. This solution also lets them to know harvesting projection, to optimize water usage, to prevent plagues and diseases, to reduce fertilizers consumption and to catalogue soils depending on climate and culture.
Waspmote Plug & Sense! Sensor Platforms communicate with Meshlium Gateway through 802.15.4 protocols while data is sent to the Cloud via 3G and GPRS. The information is visualized in an own cloud-based application for the project. The platform is accessible through any computer and also by a mobile application.
Plantain crops deployment functioning diagram
Sustainable farming thanks to IoT
“This project will allow to obtain knowledge from the crops and also to develop and deploy technology for agriculture sector as
Some of the benefits of deploying this project are:
- Improving environmental and agricultural sustainability.
- Promoting sustainable productivity in plantain crops.
- Organic waste management.
- Crops traceability.
- Safety of the product.
With the deployment of the Smart Agriculture project, the Colombian
Along decades, the most important and also exported banana variety
Discover more about this project watching this video recorded by SENA Regional Risaralda to show the project:
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Watch how Libelium is powering the IoT Revolution
More info:
- For technical details on Waspmote hardware, sensors and how to program a Smart Agriculture application: Smart Agriculture Board Technical Guide
- For technical details on Waspmote hardware, sensors and how to program a Smart Environment PRO
: Gases PRO Technical Guideapplication - Read more about Libelium sensor product lines in the Waspmote, Waspmote Plug & Sense! Sensor Platform and Meshlium Gateway websites.
References:
- Article from Libelium.com
- SENA Regional Risaralda: sena.edu.co
- Red Tecnoparque Colombia:tecnoparque.sena.edu.co
- Project design and deployment: youtube.com