Abstract:
Agriculture is one of the pillars to the social, economical and political well-being of Ethiopia.
Weather, farm inputs, farm management practices and soil health status are among the
significant parameters hindering farm productivity of farmers. Extensive cropping and grazing
practices have also affected the country’s soil health which caused poor water holding capacity,
nutrient depletion, reduced soil depth and poor productivity. In countries like Ethiopia, where
agriculture has a significant economical role, it is imperative to monitor the status of the soil
regularly to make logical decisions regarding farming practices, input use and resource
management, among others using Wireless Sensor Networks.
In recent years, the automation in agriculture has become a significant issue. The parameters like
soil pH, soil moisture, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, temperature, and humidity play a
crucial role to increase crop yield. In this paper we have developed an architecture that is
deployed using sensors to monitor the health status of soil. In this work, Soil Moisture,
DHT22 / AM2302, PH and Nitrogen Phosphorus Potassium sensors were used to collect real
time data of soil in the farm land. Here the deployed sensors along with the Arduino
Microcontroller circuit is made to detect the different component of the soil. In this work, when a
soil moisture sensor is outside of anything and immersed in very dry soil, it gives 1024 reading.
As the water is poured to soil increases, the reading is less than 370.
On this study k-nearest neighbor which uses proximity to make classifications or predictions
about the grouping of an individual data point, were used to classify the soil health status. For
this classification of the soil health, we used K nearest neighbor (KNN) supervised machine
learning algorithm on the data collected by deployed sensors. And, the evaluation is performed
on KNN using accuracy as evaluation metrics. In this thesis, the KNN algorithm is affected by
the value of K that we choose and the accuracy rate is better at k= 3 i.e. 87.42%.
Keywords: Wireless sensor networks, soil health monitoring, Nutrient detection, Environment
monitoring, Sensors.