A microcontroller based soil fertility measurement and land usage system for small scale farmers.

Abstract

The system development was motivated by the need to reduce the losses in form of low or poor quality crop yields in the time of harvesting being caused as a result of inaccurate methods used by farmers while determining the type of crop to plant on given piece of land. The system comprises of a hardware and software part. The hardware part comprises of an a conductivity probe sensor for measuring the conductivity (EC) value of a given soil sample which represents its level of soil fertility plus and circuit connected with and an Arduino board whose purpose is to store and interpret the commands to be used by the conductivity probe in measuring the soil fertility levels of a given soil sample plus sending the obtained values to database server on the P.C. The software part comprises of a database server consisting of the threshold E.C values of the different crops below or above which crops can’t be able to yield maximally. These values are compared with the values measured by the sensor from a given soil sample to determine the type of crops suitable for given piece of land which are then displayed on a graphical user interface on a person computer. This helps farmers in making wise decisions on the type of crops to type on a given piece of land plus, other good farming practices to avoid making losses at the end of a season.