Automatic Fertilized-Irrigation Control and Management System

Abstract

As serious food insecurity persists in many parts of the world, improving productivity in agriculture in a sustainable manner is today a realistic target. Farming plays an important role in food production and economic development in Nigeria and the world as a whole. Getting high yield from farm produce depend on land fertility, soil moisture and other climatic factors. This paper aims at developing an automatic fertilized-irrigation control and management system for the improvement of soil porosity and nutrient by timely application of fertilizer and water level required for the crops growth and development. This will metabolize the soil texture, give the nutrient to the crops, build plant tissue as well as increase the rate of crop productivity. The implementation of the system has been achieved by interfacing several components and intelligence unit such as ISE sensors, DHT11 sensor, Actuator, AT89C52 microcontroller and other components to automatically apply soluble agrochemical fertilizer and water based on plant needs. The designed system is tested with tomato crop planted on sandy, loamy and clay soil, respectively. The obtained result shows that the developed system applied higher water of about 391 mm3 on the tomato crop planted on sandy soil compared with the the other soil types which was 383 and 380 mm3 on loam and clay soil, respectively at the moisture content of 16%