Increase Kitchen Garden Productivity using IOT and Virtuino app
Abstract
Continuously increasing food prices of basic kitchen items, fruits and vegetables the poor and fixed income groups are suffering from the decreasing real incomes and purchasing power. The marginal increase in the income of the poor people to enable them to gain access to food and improve their nutrition is the need of the present time. The kitchen garden falls under bio-intensive and participatory innovation which can provide year round availability, access and consumption of adequate amount and varieties which supply not only the calorific demands but also the micronutrients by the resource poor. One of the easiest ways of ensuring access to a healthy diet that contains adequate macro- and micronutrients is to produce many different kinds of foods in the home garden. This is especially important in rural areas where people have limited income-earning opportunities and poor access to markets. Kitchen gardening contributes to household food security by providing direct access to food that can be harvested, prepared and fed to family members, often on a daily basis. Kitchen gardens can be grown in the empty space available at the backyard of the house or a group of women can come together, identify a common place or land and grow desired vegetables, fruits, cereals etc that can benefit the women and community as a whole. This leads to give the idea of automated kitchen gardening system. The system is designed to sense soil moisture and amount of light falling on the plants. When the moisture content in the soil is too low, the system will give command to start a pump and water the soil. Apart from this the Arduino and ESP8266 it will transmit information on moisture level and ambient light. You can monitor all the data from your smart phone by using Virtuino app. Then a twit can be send to your account automatically if the moisture falls below a given threshold value. It provides full control and monitoring of variables such as temperature, pest management and control works and more.
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Introduction
In Euthopia and world over high population growth, rural urban migration and vulgarities of weather have pushed the cost of food upwards (Silvia, 2012). The increased use of food crops in biodiesel production put further imbalance to food supply which further affects the demand/supply relationship. Non-communicable diseases add further pressure to the citizens and more so to low income groups. The resultant of this is more people are going to be food insecure. Famine Early Warning system warned that there will be a rise from 2.2 million to 2.4 million food insecure people in August 2012 (UN, 2012).
The answer to increased food demand cannot be met by the green revolution as well as rain fed agriculture which is already showing fatigue (Pastakia, 2011) This food insecure group needs to face the current environmental and health challenges by identifying ways to better align aesthetics, ecology, and health (Denver Urban Gardens, 2012). A kitchen garden can be a part of the solution to this problem. As already proven one-size-fits all solutions cannot be applied in every area to answer the question of food sustainability (Beddington, 2011).
The higher demand for food should be met by practical innovations like kitchen gardening which not only improves availability but also answers the question of diversity required for a healthy community. The kitchen gardens can be viewed as an adaptive strategy of communities as an entry point for development. The kitchen garden can also help to reduce the gap of productivity between the technical potential and actual production levels of food crops due to low use of suboptimal inputs and low adoption of most productive technologies (Tittonell, 2012). A kitchen garden involves the very people who are the greatest resource for development in a view to improve their own livelihoods and empowerment as envisaged in the rural university concept (Mathai, 1985). The kitchen gardening is a radical transformation towards using resources more efficiently. The kitchen garden is perhaps the only available ecological space available to the poor to meet their economic needs especially so in Africa where the poor tends to rely more on natural resource base for their livelihood. Kitchen Gardens depend on the gardeners for maintenance and are spaces made meaningful by the actions of people during the course of their every-day lives.
Conclusion
The sensors and microcontrollers of all Nodes are successfully interfaced with microcontroller and wireless communication is achieved between various Nodes.
All observations and experimental tests proves that propose project is a complete solution to kitchen garden /field activities, irrigation problems and pest management and control works respectively. Implementation of such a system in the kitchen garden can definitely help to improve the yield of the garden products and overall production.