Agricultural Application of LoRaWAN Technology

Managing areas without network coverage to carry out environmental and soil monitoring represents a high-priority goal for developing new technological scenarios for digital agriculture. Being able to interact with remote plants and systems, such as for example environmental control systems and technical means including irrigation is now crucial for implementation with precision agriculture to advance in agriculture 4.0. LoRaWAN technology constitutes an interesting option to address such needs as it operates at low frequencies guaranteeing great range of coverage coupled with low power consumption and low costs. At the CREA Open-Hardware prototype laboratory, a LoRaWAN network, based on open-source technology and dedicated to agriculture, is being implemented and developed on the national territory. This system is currently aimed at research in various scientific applications, ranging from of the soil, plants and the environment, up to the remote control of irrigation systems, as well as energy consumption measurements for automated stables and monitoring agricultural machinery working parameters during operations. Two examples are discussed stressing the advantages in terms of suitability, affordability and precision of this approach.