Smart Farm Management

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Agriculture is still the occupation of the majority of Turkish people with more than 2.2 million registered farmers and the country being one of the few self-sufficient countries in the world in terms of food. However, more than 1 million tractors are not compatible with the existing high-tech systems providing farm management and precision agriculture solutions as most farmers can’t afford to upgrade their equipment or buy a new one. In the framework of Smart Farm Management project, this need will be addressed, developing a novel, low-cost solution, able to optimize spraying and fertilizing efficiency and to evaluate their environmental footprint. Thus, small and medium scale farmers will be able to manage their farm more effective, applying precision agriculture solutions using the existing machinery without having to purchase new and expensive implements, increasing their competitiveness with immediate impact on the rest of the economy. The proposed solution includes three complementary tools, a mobile application for notifying and informing farmers about the most efficient process, a web-based application for mapping, predicting the ideal timing for the operations and conducting environmental analysis and finally an actuator and a terminal box for controlling the whole agricultural system. Besides the cost benefit of the project, ensuring food and nutritional security, together with resource efficiency, and facing climate change is a major challenge for society. Smart Farm Management is aligned with this challenge, providing a resource-efficient eco-innovative solution, minimizing resources consumption. The better targeted application of chemicals will greatly diminish many of the agricultural related environmental problems, such as underground water contamination, will improve the working conditions, eliminating the exposure of farmers in the fertilizing and spraying chemicals and will minimize at the same time the chemicals residues of the agricultural products that have been accused of burden the human health of consumers achieving national and eventually global food security and health prevention.