A Web-Server-Embedded Information Monitoring System for Fruit Farm

摘要

Fruit farm productivity is greatly influenced by environment change and management level. In recent decade, real-time environment monitoring has become to an essential tool in agricultural automation. A web-server-embedded information monitoring system was developed to dynamically monitor air/soil environment and plant image in local or remote area for fruit farm management. As a test, a WWAN node system and a WLAN node system each with four CCD cameras and eight sensors including air temperature, relative humidity, CO_2 concentration, solar radiation, soil temperature, soil moisture, soil conductivity, and soil water potential were developed and deployed at a Jujube farm in Aksu, Xinjiang and communicated with an information server in Beijing using CDMA service with IPsec-based VPN connection. After a one-year testing, the fruit tree images and environment data were dynamically, accurately, wirelessly, remotely collected by the system with 26 W electricity consumption. Therefore, the system is an available instrument to digitalized production management for fruit farm.