Power Consumption of Crop Sensing Systems for Monitoring Crops Growth

In recent years, agricultural practices have been influenced to an ever-increasing extent by Industry 4.0 trends. While there is much fear of what this type of industrialization implies, these fears are often misplaced: full automation, where robots take over, is just one form of industrialization and is not likely to happen on a wide scale for farming contexts anytime soon. This paper focuses on the investigation of power consumption of a farm sensing system, which is designed around these new approaches to production to propose a cost-effective solution for monitoring and controlling agricultural production, providing a comprehensive analysis of the contextual complications, the mechanism needed to realize this system and the anticipated power consumption of the system. With the investigated power consumed by sensors monitoring crop growth, and the cost associated with the sources of energy considered, assistive technologies can be provided which assist farmers with the existing practices.