Community Farm monitoring toolkit: Design and implementation of a Low-cost tool for sustainable community based agricultural projects in Africa

Nowadays sustainable agriculture exploits new technologies such as internet of things (IoT) mixed with community engagement and participation that represent a great potential for addressing sustainability goals at large. This paper presents a low-cost community-based control system for remote monitoring of surrounding parameters and other sustainability indicators such as quantity of yearly harvests, yearly local employments and so on with the use of sensors. The hardware system includes an air quality sensor, an air humidity and temperature sensor, a soil moisture sensor, a real time clock providing the time and an SD card to record the collected data. The designed tool gathers both data from sensors and incoming data from community through SMS which are therefore processed and forwarded to a specific online dashboard to support community decision-making, thus forming the community control system feedback loop. Experimental results from the considered agricultural community project show that the system works well and could be used in other similar and/or larger scale projects.