Introduction

American Farming is deeply ingrained in our country's identity; a large driver in American population growth and land expansion, farming has established itself as a core industry in American culture. Due to a combination of socio-economic disparities and agrarian policy, the barrier to entry for new farmers has become increasingly high. These difficulties to establish and maintain a profitable farm has led the farming industry to consolidate land and profits unproportionately. The reduced competition in food supply chains has culminated on the consumer level, negatively impacting food prices, quality, and environmental sustainability.

The combination of these factors are prompting a cultural return to self-sustainability, as planting ones own produce can alleviate some of the challenges created by the American farming industry. Farming requires immense amounts of institutional knowledge which is frequently acquired through years of experience. To a consumer farmer, with little or no background in operating a farm, obtaining this knowledge through conventional methods is intangible. Plantos aims to provide an out-of-the-box solution for what consumer farmers lack in institutional industrial farming knowledge.

A Plantos sensor is an IoT microcontroller that collects environmental inputs through a VWC sensor and soil temperature gauge. The inputs are aggregated to a centralized relational database through an API call triggered directly from the microcontroller. The environmental data is processed through a timeseries ML model to predict lows in soil moisture levels. These predictive outputs are translated to notify the end-user when to water the crop and in what volumetric quantity.

Sources

[ https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.1525/elementa.356/112494/Securing-the-future-of-US-agriculture-The-case-for ] [ https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2024/10/08/usda-announces-actions-lower-food-prices-bring-fairness-farmers-and#:~:text=%E2%80%9CFor%20too%20long%2C%20consolidation%20in,prices%20at%20the%20grocery%20store. ]