Solar-Powered Soil Nutrient Detector for Rice Field

Abstract

For almost centuries, Filipino considered rice as one of the most important food. The country was became one of the biggest rice importer not only in the ASEAN country but also across the globe. In the previous year rice farmers had faced crop related issues that heavily affects the rice production rate and resulting for low importation rate. There were several factors that affect the rice production such as biological constraints, soil fertility and not suitable quality rice crop variant for the specific planting field. At present the government are still formulating solutions through science-based agricultural research to address the issue and reduce yield gaps among rice farmers. Several researches were done to provide solutions through collaboration of different fields such as Information technology and agriculture. Development of machines technologies and prototypes to collect, store, process and analyze data to improve rice production. The study focused on the development of a prototype device that will determine the nutrient content of the rice field soil such as Nitrogen, Potassium and Phosphorus elements that should be present in the soil for help plant to grow and other soil characteristics such as soil moisture content, humidity and temperature. The output data from the device will be stored, validate and analyze to become the reference of the Office of Provincial Agriculturist in helping rice farmers in selecting rice crop variant and appropriate fertilizer application resulting for a higher yield.

 Keywords - Soil Nutrient, Rice crop, Solar power, Soil moisture