Wireless Sensor Networks for On-Field Agricultural Management Process
Luca Bencini, Davide Di, Giovanni Collodi, Antonio Manes, Gianfranco Manes · InTech eBooks · 2010
IntroductionAgriculture is one of the most ancient activities of man in which innovation and technology are usually accepted with difficulty, unless real and immediate solutions are found for specific problems or for improving production and quality.Nevertheless, a new approach of gathering information from the environment could represent an important step towards high quality and eco-sustainable agriculture.Nowadays, irrigation, fertilization and pesticides management are often left to the farmer's and agronomist's discretion: common criteria used to guarantee safe culture and plant growth are often giving a greater amount of chemicals and water than necessary.There is no direct feedback between the decision of treating or irrigating plants and the real effects in the field.Plant conditions are usually committed to sporadic and faraway weather stations that cannot provide accurate and local measurements of the fundamental parameters in each zone of the field.Also, agronomic models, based on these monitored data, cannot provide reliable information.On the contrary, agriculture needs detailed monitoring in order to obtain real time feedback between plants, local climate conditions and man's decisions.The concept of precision agriculture has been around for some time now.Blackmore et al., in 1994(Blackmore, 1994) defined it as a comprehensive system designed to optimize agricultural production by carefully tailoring soil and crop management to correspond to the unique condition found in each field while maintaining environmental quality.The early adopters during that time found precision agriculture to be unprofitable and the instances in which it was implemented were few and far between.Further, the high initial investment in the form of electronic equipment for sensing and communication meant that only large farms could afford it.The technologies proposed at this point comprised three aspects: Remote Sensing (RS), Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographical Information System (GIS).RS coupled with GPS coordinates produced accurate maps and models of the agricultural fields.The sampling was typically through electronic sensors such as soil probes and remote optical scanners from satellites.The collection of such data in the form of electronic computer databases gave birth to the GIS.Statistical analyses were then conducted on the data and the variability of agricultural land was charted with respect to its properties.The technology, apart from being 1 www.intechopen.