Wireless Sensor Networks for On-Field Agricultural Management Process

Agriculture is one of the most ancient activities of man in which innovation and technology are usually accepted with difficulty, unless real and immediate solutions are found for specific problems or for improving production and quality. Nevertheless, a new approach of gathering information from the environment could represent an important step towards high quality and eco-sustainable agriculture. Nowadays, irrigation, fertilization and pesticides management are often left to the farmer’s and agronomist’s discretion: common criteria used to guarantee safe culture and plant growth are often giving a greater amount of chemicals and water than necessary. There is no direct feedback between the decision of treating or irrigating plants and the real effects in the field. Plant conditions are usually committed to sporadic and faraway weather stations that cannot provide accurate and local measurements of the fundamental parameters in each zone of the field. Also, agronomic models, based on these monitored data, cannot provide reliable information. On the contrary, agriculture needs detailed monitoring in order to obtain real time feedback between plants, local climate conditions and man’s decisions.