Coconut Plantations are generally said to be an affordable and an assured ROI business. More and more people around the world are consuming Coconut based products like oil, soaps, and health products, cattle feeds, packaged drink, coir etc.  The trunk and leaves of the tree can be used for house construction, mending fences, thatching and making household artefacts. Though there is a steady demand, the producers around the world are struggling to meet the same. This can be accounted to numerous factors such as drastic climate changes, re-occurring natural disasters, and strong pest attacks etc. The lack of knowledge in latest farming methodologies and being apprehensive towards embracing new technologies are resulting in low productivity levels.  Smart Coconut Plantations can help farmers counter the same.

IoT based smart coconut plantations

The current market analysis suggests that the Asian countries have lion’s share of world’s total coconut production. Countries like Indonesia and Philippines produce more than 3.5 crore metric tons of coconuts every year that accounts to about 60% of the total global production. The food and the agricultural organization of the United Nations have organized numerous programs including smart farming concept to order to increase the coconut productivity particularly in the ASEAN region. The idea is to constantly provide information on new farming methodologies, weather monitoring, disaster management and sophisticated pest management. The advent of smart farming concept can be helpful to manage all these areas thus helping farmers increase their crop productivity and deliver better quality yields. This blog throws light on how Internet of Things (IoT) technology can help the coconut farming community build smart coconut plantations and get sustainable yields from their farms.

Five areas where IoT can be applied in coconut plantations:

Irrigation

For any crops, water supply is the most important factor in deciding its quality and growth. It would be a challenge to manually irrigate trees in vast coconut plantations. IoT sensors help in automating and remotely controlling the irrigation process. Sensor units comprising of soil-moisture and humidity sensors would be deployed across the farm. These sensor units would pick up data and would pass on to a cloud based gateway platform which in turn will trigger the water valves and other corresponding actuators based on the set thresholds. Water leakage can also be identified with the help of sensors. Precise irrigation can increases crop yield by many folds and also can increase the returns by more than 14-15%.

Nutrient supply

Be it for humans or plants, optimum supply of nutrients is very important. It is important to constantly monitor the level of nutrients in the soil and in the crop as any deficit would affect the yield. The sensor modules would pick up the level of nutrients in the crop and would pass on the data to nutrient analyzers. The choice of the fertilizers can be decided with the data coming from such analyzers. Similarly nutrient mixture and be mixed to the irrigating water in optimum quantity with the help of these sensors and actuators. The ion presence and the quantity can be monitored continuously and the data would be readily available for the farmers in their dashboard.

Pest control & inspection

Pest infections are nightmare for the farmers, not only it result in huge monetary losses, the farmer’s reputation would also be at stake. It is extremely important to foresee pest attacks and take necessary measures to counter the same. The deployed sensors would monitor pest behaviour and growth, combines it with the plant growth & environment factors and can trigger optimum supply of pesticides to the infected area. The sprinkled amount of pesticide would be stored and analysed for future reference

Weather monitoring system

In countries like Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand, natural disasters like flood, cyclones and typhoons occur pretty frequently. In a country like India, the situation can be just the opposite. South Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, which hosts largest coconut plantations in the country suffers severe drought during certain times of the year. With an efficient IoT based weather monitoring system installed in farms, the farmers can be proactive to counter the environmental issues facing them.

Inter-Cropping

Coconut plantations are generally spread across a vast area of land with lots of empty spaces in between. The land resources can be utilized to the maximum by planting other crops in the gaps. In a recurrent coconut farming system, vegetables and spices can be grown for extra income purposes. IoT can help in choosing such inter-crops by monitoring the soil and the conditions. Advanced farming techniques can be used for the growth of such crops.

IoT in coconut farming can also be extended to monitoring the crop storage, geo-tracking the coconut shipments etc. Smart coconut plantations can really help automating irrigation and other manual process to a large extent.

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