A MQTT-based Soil Moisture Level Notification System for a Smart Farm

Smart irrigation is among the IoT smart farming practices deemed important in optimizing the ever-growing need for farm produce given the climate change and other farm produce affecting events e.g., COVID-19. In this paper we aim at enhancing the existing technology in smart farming by proposing some insight towards developing an easy-to-use tool. The tool helps irrigation farmers in making informed decisions on their water sprinkler placement for maintaining the recommended soil water moisture contents for their farm. Our framework notifies the farmer when the sprinklers rearrangement is due based on the farm’s soil moisture level readings. Our work defines the optimal computational parameter values for the strategic sprinkler deployment and introduces the required instruments and set up procedure. We demonstrate the implementation and user-friendly output of the apparatus with a display showing the actionable soil moisture information. Such results will provide the very critical information needed by a smart irrigation farmer to make informed decisions about their farm based on its soil water moisture contents.