Horticulture 4.0: Transforming Agriculture with IoT-Based Need-Specific Irrigation

India, being a case of a water crisis growing at an exponential rate due to inefficient irrigation practices, needs innovative solutions. Conventional manual irrigation has been running off at a rapid speed, depleting the groundwater and putting at stake agricultural productivity and food security. Studies say that, by 2050, India is going to face serious water shortages. This paper presents an IoT -based irrigation system for addressing this challenge. Since this system can exactly monitor the content of water in the soil, need-based irrigation can be enabled, optimizing water utilization without overdose or underdose. This solution, based on open-source hardware, is a very cheap way to revolutionize agriculture.