New Smart Wheat Farm Application Powered by Seeed SenseCAP
Located in the North China Plain, the small city Dingzou has a strong focus on agriculture, with the gross agricultural production surpassing 50% of the city’s total output value. To further boost production quality and efficiency for farming products, local governments, and owner of large wheat farms are looking for applying agricultural IoT projects to achieve efficiency, sustainability, optimization of natural resources and traceability.
The partnership between Beishao Collective Share Cooperative, a Beijing-based System Integrator and Seeed in building a smart wheat farm is one of these projects that applied to local farms. The smart wheat farm solution features a SenseCAP environmental data collection system, automatic irrigation system, video/image monitoring system and a data display & remote control management platform.
On May 31, our tech team left for the wheat farm to help set up the SenseCAP Environmental Data Collection System on site. The system consists of a SenseCAP LR Gateway and 11 different sensors that collect data including soil pH, soil electrical conductivity, wind speed, wind direction, light, rainfall, photosynthetically active radiation, air pressure, air temperature, and humidity. These data that may affect the quality and growth of the crop, will be sent to the cloud through the gateway and is made accessible to the farmers on the Data Display & Remote Control Management Platform.
The automatic irrigation system, video/image monitoring system and the data display & remote control management platform are developed by our technical partner. Based on the soil humidity data collected by SenseCAP, the controller of the automatic irrigation system could automatically trigger the switch of the water pump. The real-time video and images collected by the HD cameras could provide instructions for farmers to make management decisions like pest control or harvest timing. Meanwhile, the data display & remote control management platform works as a control panel for the whole smart wheat farm solution, where all the data collected could be accessible and controls could be done.
When the whole solution was fully set up, one of the farmers Wu gave us the feedback after trying it out for several days, “It’s really helpful to have this solution ready for us. It could reduce man power input and change the traditional way of field management. For example, we don’t need to go to locations of the pumps to turn them on or off. We could do it here at home. Such a convenience.”
This smart wheat farm solution highlights Seeed’s ready-to-go hardware SenseCAP for a fast time-to-market experience. The end users (local farmers) experienced great time savings since they do not have to access physically the farm or fields every time they want to check something. Additionally, tons of knowledge has been generated because the user can now compare their experience with real data. In this case, the irrigation system was also implemented based on data, generating large cost savings. Key users understand that real-time monitoring in their farm is necessary to be more productive and efficient.
“We’re very excited to work with Seeed again. It’s great to embrace the SenseCAP system into the whole smart wheat farm solution. Thanks to their Technical Team who worked with us on-site to help solve issues that directly impacted the project,” comments Sun, Head of IoT & Communications at our cooperated System Integrator.
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