Greenhouse Digitalization and Water Irrigation Nutrient Liquid Management
摘要
Agriculture plays a vital role for society and in particular production in greenhouses where there is intensive food production. Since man stopped being nomadic, man has adapted agriculture techniques to cope with new human and society needs by using technological advances. With the use of greenhouses to produce food goods and the need to automate, control and optimize plant growth, new challenges have arisen, such as: setting up the correct temperatures, humidity, nutrients, among other parameters as well as collect respective values, in order to optimize them. This task, if carried out manually, constitutes a considerable burden, which must be avoided the main objective of this work was to contribute to the automation of such tasks. This way, a prototype to read and supply such parameters to the greenhouse administrator has been developed in a real case-study. It interconnects several sensors permitting collect data from the liquid nutrient supply process and send this information through a data network and, thus, providing company managers with the convenient, pre-stablished chemical values: pH, electroconductivity, humidity of the substrate as well as volume of irrigation mixture essential to plant growth (water and nutrients). By a dashboard, it is possible for the greenhouse manager to monitor several points of the greenhouse, under study, designing a digitalized and automated process in these operations to control the variables mentioned, ensuring that waste of water and nutrients is avoided and consequently optimizing irrigation, and plant growth processes, by replacing the manual process. The use of such prototype device permits to solve the problem of data collection, frequent manual measurements by replacing it with an automatic process, which becomes more efficient, accurate, sustainable, with better water performance, increases resilience to climate change, promotes food security, improves nutrition and protects the environment and biodiversity.