Intelligent Monitoring and Control of Vertical Farms for Metropolitan Areas

Abstract

Agriculture is a critical sector in the fast-growing world. According to a study and recent estimate, the trend in the rise in population can be observed to grow from 7.3 billion people to 9.7 billion people [1] by the year 2050. With an increase in the population, the rise in food demand is inevitable. This high increase rate creates a gap between the food demand and supply.In India, traditional agricultural practices depend on adequate rainfall, quality of soil, and climatic conditions to grow crops effectively. They cater to many expenses such as seeds, fertilizers, labor, and pesticides. It also requires a lot of water depending upon the crops. Excessive use of pesticides and water can deteriorate the quality of soil, and in turn the quality of crops. Even with the high-yielding seeds and additional nutrient manure, the yield cannot be boosted to satisfy the ever-rising need for food. This type of agriculture suffers great losses from the attack of pests and uncertainty in climate. The major problem that one can observe in recent times is that with the increasing population and demand, the scarcity of land resources is even more prominent.Smart Farming can be defined as managing farms using Information and Communication Technologies [2] to increase the quality as well as the amount of yield while optimizing the space, energy, and human labor required. The solution to the rising gap between food supply and demand is using smart farming technologies. Hydroponics is one of the methods which can be used for farming where less amount of

Evaluation of Growth Responses of Lettuce and Energy Efficiency of the Substrate and Smart Hydroponics Cropping System

“…Plants are monitored for their nutrient level and other necessities using the IoT, and the supply of water and nutrients is controlled using fuzzy logic. Lettuce and bok choy were experimented with using a smart hydroponic setup based on fuzzy logic in [ 19 , 21 ] and were found to grow better in terms of leaf size in [ 16 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 ]. Raspberry Pi and Arduino are used to monitor the various parameters that are known to affect crop yield, such as CO 2 , moisture in the growing medium, humidity, temperature, and light intensity.…”