Monitoring Gas Emissions in Agricultural Productions through Low-Cost Technologies: The POREM (Poultry-Manure-Based Bio-Activator for Better Soil Management through Bioremediation) Project Experience

Agricultural production or rural activities can involve the emission of unpleasant gases, malodors, or most commonly, greenhouse gases. In any case, the control and monitoring of such emissions in rural, unattended, and remote locations represent an issue in need of addressing. In this article, the monitoring of gases produced by a poultry manure depot and performed by devices based on low-cost gas sensors in the context of the POREM (poultry-manure-based bio-activator for better soil management through bioremediation) project is reported. This experience has shown that the continuous and real-time monitoring of gas emissions in an unattended, remote, and rural area, where it is unfeasible to employ expensive, professional instruments, can be successfully performed by low-cost technologies. Two portable monitoring units developed in the laboratory and based on low-cost gas sensors were used to provide indications about the concentrations of NH3, CH4, H2S, and CO2. During this experiment, two monitors were deployed: the first one was placed in the manure storage depot, while the second one was deployed out of the storage site to compare the gas concentrations related to the outdoor environment with the gas emissions coming from the manure. Both devices were wirelessly linked to the Internet, even though the radio signal was weak and unstable in that area. This situation provided us with the opportunity to test a particular protocol based on sending and receiving e-mails containing commands for the remote machines. This experiment proved the effectiveness of the use of low-cost devices for gas emission monitoring in such particular environments.