The confinement resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is definitely disrupting vegetable supplies all over Mauritius. The main reasons being that supplies in fertilisers and pesticides are disrupted, and most importantly farmers are not able to attend to their fields to continue irrigation and fertilisation. Adding to this, there has been several cases of theft in the fields during the curfew giving into losses for the farmers. The need for greater efficiency presents challenges that farmers can tackle with reliable answers to real-world questions about irrigation, plant production and fertilisation. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, farmers’ yields will have to increase around 50 percent by 2050 to feed the world. Growers need innovative solutions to protect crops and more advanced agricultural technology to boost efficiency to that level.
The aim of this project is to help in soil management and crop production, mitigate risks with data sourced via IoT and enable farmers to optimise their crop production practices and yields. Therefore, farmers to have ‘an eye and a hand’ on their cultivations all while being physically away. This outcome of the project will firstly enable the farmers to have real-time monitoring of essential parameters such as soil water content, soil NPK content and intrusion detection into their fields and secondly, automate irrigation and fertilisation based on real-time parameters captured through an IoT system (including sensors) and weather forecast by integrating a reputable weather forecast solution, and thirdly be able to predict their yield by combining statistical data and collected data.