Lessons learnt from deploying an IoT sensing system for e-Agriculture in South Africa

One of the initiatives contributing to meeting the agricultural needs of farmers, particularly in the underserved communities in resource-constrained environments, is the Leap Agri project. This paper presents one of the outcomes from the Leap Agri project, specifically an Internet of Things (IoT) system which consists of Leap Agri Farmer and Leap Agri Sensor applications, as well as the lessons learnt during the initial stages of the prototyping of the sensing system in a South African environment. The paper sought to provide an answer to the research question which is “what are the lessons learnt during the early stage of the adaptation of an IoT-based mobile system for e-Agriculture in a South African environment?”. The observed experience of assembling the IoT sensing system is described in this paper. From the observations, several lessons are deduced to inform future exploration of the Leap Agri applications and the sensing box.