VegIoT Garden: a modular IoT Management Platform for Urban Vegetable Gardens

Nowadays, the agricultural sector is facing challenges especially because of an extensive range of grueling trends. In this context, new highly technological applications—such as Internet of Things (IoT), Precision Agriculture (PA), and blockchain—are enabling Smart Agriculture (SA), which holds the promise to support future needs. In this extended abstract, a low-cost, modular, and energy-efficient IoT platform for SA, denoted as VegIoT Garden, based on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices, adopting short- and long-range communication protocols (IEEE 802.11 and LoRa), and aiming at enhancing the management of vegetable gardens through the collection, monitoring, and analysis of sensor data, related to relevant parameters of growing plants (i.e., air and soil humidity and temperature), is presented. The infrastructure is completed with an Internet-enabled Home Node (HN) and an iOS-based mobile App, developed in order to simplify data visualization and plants’ status monitoring. The proposed IoT system has been validated in a real scenario (a vegetable garden) for more than a week: the collected data highlighted possible causes for a disease contracted by vegetables (namely, tomato’s blossom-end root), thus validating VegIoT Garden.