Development and evaluation of an automated irrigation system for ordinary agriculture farm

Abstract

Irrigation is a method of applying water to land or soil to assists the growth of crops. Moisture loss is a common problem in the agricultural situation in developing countries. Therefore, a study was conducted to set up a controlling system for irrigation that is based on the moisture content of soil of the crop field to prevent water and electrical waste using a singlephase water pump and to test the performance of the machine at the field level. The irrigation control machine functions with the help of two electrodes used to measure the soil water content were developed successfully using the low-cost electrical and electronic accessories which functions with DC voltage. This study highlights that the automatic machine was successfully performed in the field. When the machine was used in the field, the vegetative parameters such as average plant height and mean leaf area of the maize plants which was grown under the irrigation of an automatic irrigation system were significantly greater than the normally irrigated plants. Further, the maize plants grown under the automatic irrigation system showed early flowering and 34% average individual plant yield improvement compared to the conventional irrigation system.