Development of Soil Moisture Monitoring Device for Irrigation Water Scheduling

Abstract

Farmers need to rely on some methods of determining the water needs of their crops to avoid production and quality losses. In this work, a soil moisture monitoring device has been developed. It is capable of monitoring soil moisture level at the root zone of the crops and can also send short message service (SMS) to the farmer on his mobile phone when the threshold value is reached, either when irrigating or depletion of the soil moisture. The device comprises of three major units; input unit made up of YL-69 soil moisture sensor, control unit made up of PIC16F877A microcontroller and the output unit; which comprises of GSM module SIM9000A and 16x2 LCD screen. Device’s performance carried out/determined at 0-60% output range setting. From the experimental result on the developed soil moisture device, first-day reading obtained at 0-60% output range was 56%. Also, readings from soil moisture meter and gravimetric method on the same day were found to be 55% and 52.5%, respectively. The result indicates the effectiveness of the device. Furthermore, from the result obtained by calibrating the device at 0-60% output range with the gravimetric output gives the coefficient of determination (R2) values of 0.9808. These values indicate a strong linear correlation relationship.