Solar powered smart irrigation system-an innovative concept

Abstract

Irrigation is one of the important process in agricultural system. Generally it is dependent on rain but after introduction of pressurized irrigation system the dependency of rain is decreased day by day. The pressurized irrigation system is controlled manually by the farmers. Manually operated system requires extra manpower for supervising therefore it decreases the field efficiency. Sometimes this irrigation leads to over irrigation than the actual plant requirement and under irrigation when plants required more water in their peak periods. Which result slow crop growth rate, late flowering and reduction of the yield are the major concern due to water deficiency. Moreover, excess irrigation in the root zones leads to ill health of the root zones and vegetation, additional cost for farmer, wastage of time and water. Also salinity of the land can be increased by unbroken stretch supply of more than enough water. On the other hand electricity supply is the major concern in remote areas. Farmers are not getting regular supply of electricity for agriculture operations. Hence this paper introduces a new approach for solar powered smart irrigation system (SIS) in agricultural management using soil moisture sensor. Based on the sensed data, system automatically decided about the necessary action for irrigation and also notifies the user. The system also focused on the use of solar energy utilization by the sensors during communication. The paper discussed the working mechanism and component details of system.