Wireless sensor network (WSN) can achieve real-time data collection and transmission of environment, soil, meteorology, crop physiology and other information in agriculture. The data provided by WSN could be used for decision making and management, which is very important in precision agriculture. Wheat farmland wireless sensor network has the characteristics of wide coverage area, long planting period, inconvenient energy supply, and serious impact of crop environment on wireless signal transmission. Routing protocol is an important method to achieve long-term WSN monitoring by selecting an appropriate path with low energy consumption for data transmission. According to the phenomenon of uneven environment and channel parameters caused by intensive crop growth in farmland, a non-uniform clustering routing protocol based on effective energy consumption (UCEEC) was proposed in this work. The method combined with the characteristics of multi-path fading of farmland environment signals. The idea of image segmentation was introduced. Nodes with high similarity were divided into a cluster area by the dissimilarity between nodes in order to improve the intracluster communication performance. Meanwhile, a multi-hop path selection method between cluster-heads based on the estimation of two-hop effective energy consumption is designed. The energy consumption cost factor is calculated by the effective energy consumption and the average energy consumption within the cluster to achieve the minimum and balance of the overall energy consumption of the network. Simulation results show that, compared with the existing Maximum Residual Energy Based Routing (MREBR) protocol, minimum Energy Consumption Based Routing (MEC) routing protocols, UCEEC improves the energy balance effect between nodes, prolongs the network life cycle, and realizes efficient energy utilization of wireless sensor network data collection in the complex environment of wheat field.