A Novel Methodology for Sustainable Agriculture: IoT-DrivenWater Management and Crop Planning Using LoRaWAN

Efficient farming is an advanced and capital-based method of sustainable and clean food production. An IoT and AI-based system with the ‎application of LoRaWAN technology is proposed for efficient environmental monitoring in farming. The system incorporates IoT devices ‎installed in crop fields to provide real-time data visualization, monitoring, and control of key parameters such as temperature, humidity, soil ‎moisture, TDS, and water levels. These sensors are attached to ESP32 microcontrollers with LoRaWAN modules, transmitting data at 915 ‎MHz to ensure low-power, long-range communication. The system attains high accuracy (98.5%) when predicting water requirements, ‎addressing issues like overfitting that are common in standard approaches. Additionally, the system follows an integrated novel methodology-‎gy that includes Assessment of the water balance to improve crop planning, and IoT-based optimized irrigation scheduling executed through ‎a LoRaWAN-integrated cloud environment for data storage and visualization. Experimental results confirm the system's higher performance ‎in enhancing water distribution and prediction, resulting in an 8% increase in water use efficiency and a 15% reduction in crop water utilization issues. These results highlight the potential of IoT and LoRaWAN technology to advance water resource management and promote ‎sustainable agricultural practices in rural regions. The system also triggers warnings for low soil moisture, high TDS, and critically low ‎water levels, with sensor data transmitted via LoRaWAN every 120 seconds to provide farmers with real-time insights for improved decision-making‎.