Syed Muhammad Alam, Ahmed Hasssan, Abeer Bashir and Mazhar Iqbal
Agriculture is the backbone of a country particularly in South Asia because of excessive agrarian land resides there. It is beneficial for human growth and the State’s emerging Gross Domestic Product (GDP). South Asia particularly Pakistan is facing severs challenges of poverty, hunger and malnutrition along with growing population. Under these conditions, horticulture governed with emerging scientific research and developments can play a vital role in order to cope up with such challenges. Tunnel farming is such kind of one development being practiced across the globe to obtain off-season crops with three folds of more production as compared to the traditional way of vegetation. In this regard the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising approach which finds its expertise in every field of life including agriculture sector. Its application in tunnel farming has been generating ambitious results in the past few years therefore, a sound architecture and model based on latest, robust and reliable technologies can change the fate of agricultural sector in Pakistan. This paper proposed a framework with hardware design which comprises of accurate sensors for data transmission to Cortex based MPU, cloud based data unit and further appropriate actuators to regulate the desired microclimatic conditions inside the tunnel to improve the productivity followed by more revenue. Proposed hardware model provides a cheap, optimal and automatic tunnel farming solution to the middle class farmer, growing off-season crops at the far ends of the country with scarcity of electricity and water resources. Furthermore it presents a reliable user friendly database and a very simple GUI that makes it easy for the farmer to monitor the climatic changes, optimal resource utilization, the production at the far site end and its healthy transportation to the nearest consumer market along with periodic reporting of location and vital microclimatic conditions inside the vehicle. To our knowledge, this is the first proposed hardware model which uses Cortex based microcontroller for Smart Tunnel Farming. By the proposed hardware model, the cost of electricity and water can be reduced by 30 to 40% and an average of 20% increment in the production and supply of targeted crops by automatic adjustment of optimal climatic conditions inside the tunnel and monitoring of crops transportation system.
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