The Future of Vineyard Irrigation: AI-Driven Insights from IoT Data

Accurate irrigation volume prediction is crucial for sustainable agriculture. This study enhances precision irrigation by integrating diverse datasets, including historical irrigation records, soil moisture, and climatic factors, collected from a small-scale commercial estate vineyard in southwestern Idaho, the United States of America (USA), over a period of three years (2017-2019). Focusing on long-term irrigation forecasting, addressing a critical gap in sustainable water management, we use machine learning (ML) methods to predict future irrigation needs, with improved accuracy. We designed, developed, and tested a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, which achieved a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.37, and evaluated its performance against a simpler baseline linear regression (LinReg) model, which yielded a higher MSE of 1.29. We validate the results of the LSTM model using a cross-validation technique, wherein a mean MSE of 0.18 was achieved. The low value of the statistical analysis (<i>p</i>-value = 0.0009) of a paired <i>t</i>-test confirmed that the improvement is significant. This research shows the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to optimize irrigation planning and advance sustainable precision agriculture (PA), by providing a practical tool for long-term forecasting and that supports data-driven decisions.