How do you grow the maximum amount of food with the minimum amount of water and power ? How can IoT help ?
Discover more about it here!
Let's start in Israel with Netafim, which pioneered an innovative irrigation technique over forty years ago. Traditional irrigation methods do not cope well with uneven distribution of water and nutrients to crops, and waste water due to runoff and evaporation. Netafim's DripK solutions addresses these issues and helps farmers grow more with less resource - water, land and energy. This is achieved by delivering precisely the right amount of water and nutrients to the plant's roots through 'dripperlines'.
Effective irrigation is also a key component of the Farm-From-A-Box (FFAB) solution as it empowers people to grow their own sustainable food supply entirely off-grid. This is done through their modified shipping containers fitted with solar panels for power, built-in water pumps and drip irrigation for the adjacent farm. FFAB chose Netafim’s micro-irrigation technology for its cost-effectiveness and ease of operations with little local technical expertise.
Skilled Analysts helped Farm-From-A-Box with an IoT Proof of Concept (POC) using Samsara's real time IoT solution to see how easily it could be deployed and operated remotely. The testing included the Samsara Temperature Probe EM12 to measure temperature and communicate it wirelessly to a Samsara IoT Gateway GW22 placed in the modified shipping container. The GW22 has built- in cellular connectivity, which simplified connectivity issues.
The Gateway was about the size of a large smartphone and started operating as soon as it was unpacked. We placed the Gateway in the Farm-From-A-Box modified shipping container and the sensor was place in the field. The temperature sensor was preconfigured to communicate wirelessly with the Gateway. The effective range was approximately a 100 feet. We created an account on the Samsara Cloud Service and then defined which sensors which would feed time-stamped, temperature data to it.
This took less than an hour and temperature data was being shown in the online dashboard. We created alerts within the Samsara console to send alerts when the temperature exceeded 80 degrees so that irrigation levels could be adjusted to deal with the heat spell. The built-in integration between the incoming data stream and the alerting module made this very straight forward.
We created reports with different time periods to see how the temperature fluctuated during a day and over multiple days. This insight along with soil conditions was helpful in selecting which vegetables should be optimally grown. The Samsara Analytics engine also let us to define a time period (e.g. between 12-3 PM) and expand the display to better visualize temperature fluctuations.
SummaryWe were impressed with the ease with which the Samsara Sensor and Gateway could be deployed and how quickly it started sending data to the cloud console. The built in analytics engine and alerting capabilities were also simple to configure and use.
Resources
Netafim - Drip irrigation solutions
Samsara - IoT solution
Farm From A Box - Turnkey off-grid solution for community farming
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Skilled Analysts is a San Francisco based consulting firm that helps clients apply IoT technologies for their business goals and evalute the ROI. It builds IoT proof-of-concepts (POCs) quickly and affordably to evaluate technology and your planned IoT solution's business viability, before making a major commitment. These POCs are built using industry leading IoT solutions such as Samsara and integrated with your enterprise systems.
Skilled Analysts is a San Francisco based consulting firm that helps clients apply IoT technologies for their business goals and evalute the ROI. It builds IoT proof-of-concepts (POCs) quickly and affordably to evaluate technology and your planned IoT solution's business viability, before making a major commitment. These POCs are built using industry leading IoT solutions such as Samsara and integrated with your enterprise systems.