FARMER TALK - ICT’s and automated irrigation systems are a synergy to reckon with.

“Dependence on agriculture is subject to control of it”

To control agriculture, is to control the conditions under which crops both survive and thrive, particularly, climatic and soil conditions.

Is that possible? And in practical terms, can the ordinary farmer control when it rains, how much it rains and where in his garden the rain falls? Your guess is as good as mine. The answer is no.

However, the closest man can achieve significant control of his agriculture insofar as its water requirement is concerned, is through irrigation.

Even so, whereas irrigation is now the trend, gaining widespread popularity and attention, in academic, policy and now grassroots levels, it ought to be remembered that:-

Its success is ultimately grounded on effective system control in terms of application precision, both quantity, location and time-wise, for efficient crop water use.

As it is, conventional irrigation systems with end-user human intervention (farmer) fall short of this ideal, as illustrated in this fictional conversation between a plant and a farmer.

Plant :	Do you know how much water I need?*
Farmer	Yes, I have read books about your science and water requirement! I even have experience!
Food for thought :	Granted, you know how much water the crop needs, but do you know how much it actually WANTS during any given time of the day? Yes, you know how much water a thirsty person needs, but do you know how much that thirsty person actually WANTS at any given time of the day? The answer is NO!
Plant :	Do you know when I need that water? Can you avail it then?
Farmer :	Yes, I know when you need it, and I can avail it at those times; I have read books about your growth stages, and their respective requirement scheduling needs!
Food for thought :	Can you monitor accurately and consistently the soil moisture levels to know when they have depleted to below what the crop not just overall needs, but wants at that particular moment? The answer again is NO!
Plant :	And if you can avail it, do you know at what precise time I have had enough, and wish for no more?
Farmer:	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is obvious that whereas in our conventional human-intervention irrigation, the farmer to some extent controls the water requirement of the crop, this is only in as far as making the water accessible to the plant is concerned but hardly in regard to how much of it, and when.

Such control is ineffective! And the crop’s water use is inefficient as a result.

With the available conventional systems of irrigation such as flood and sprinkler irrigation, such ineffective control, besides being prone to human error and wasteful of water, result in over or under-utilization of water.

Worse, where this irrigation water doubly serves as a medium for chemigation and fertigation, over or under-utilization of these key inputs in crop production, negatively affects not only irrigation costs and crop productivity but also environmental health.

The idea of automating irrigation is therefore fundamental as evidenced by the obvious human-control ineffectiveness and its associated counter-productive risks.

It is therefore upon these and such kind of concerns that the automation of irrigation comes handy. And it is the nearest to which the answers to the above questions can be YES.

A. ICT’s make it possible.

One of the stellar achievements of our age is the advancement in use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in practically all aspects of our daily life.

ICT’s confer especially several benefits to the advancement of agricultural system, not least by enabling irrigation to be automated.

In a nut shell, the employment of sensors, automatic valves and controllers, successfully eliminate the need, and dependence on error prone, human monitoring of the irrigation processes.

B. Basic system components

Key to any irrigation system automation is the moisture sensors, the automated values and the controller.

Each of these basic components plays a significant role in ensuring the highest possible level of control over a crop’s water requirement than can be manually accomplished.

a) The sensors located at strategic points of the garden plots, work to measure and report on the moisture amounts in the soil at any given time.

b) The automatic values, triggered by the sensor information, respond accordingly to either open and permit or close and stop water entry into the garden

c) The controller overall, manages the interactions as the threshold-set value implementer and decision maker of the process.

This basic automatic process can be schematized as below

C. Brief on automated irrigation system operation

Overall, the automated irrigation system includes three basic stages of operation:

(i) A wired communication between the sensors and the micro-controller to give in real time, the status of moisture levels in the soil.

(ii) The decision making by the micro-controller on the irrigation action to take, depending on whether or not the moisture level reported by the sensor is the required amount (the micro-controller compares to a pre-set moisture level threshold)

(iii) Finally, the wired communication between the micro-controller and zonal valves, where the controller communicates the decision to either open and permit water entry, if the moisture amount reported by the sensor is below the pre-set threshold amount, and/or to close and stop water entry, if the moisture level reported by the sensor is higher than the pre-set threshold amount.

D. Advantages of irrigation system automation

(i) Irrigation system automation drastically cuts down on labor costs that would otherwise be required to run the system, especially on large acreages.

(ii) It also eliminates the need for end-user intervention as is characteristic of manual set-ups, and thus reduces the probabilities of human error.

(iii) Through continuous and consistent monitoring of moisture levels, automated systems achieve high levels of water application precision and efficiency of water and chemical use.

(iv) Automation also releases the farmer and allows him to apportion time for other ventures, and he/she does not have to be present to operate the irrigation system.

E. Conclusion

The focus of research in agriculture has now shifted to the recent concept of agric-technology that seeks to widen modern agricultural horizons by incorporating the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

These shifts in the focus of irrigation system design toward the new concept of hardware and software synergies is promulgated on many benefits, but above all, on the requirement to give the farmer complete control of the water requirement of the crop.

And so it can be said that ICT’s and automated irrigation systems are a synergy to reckon with, in so far as the advancement of agriculture is concerned.