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. ]

Abstract

Plantos is a project with the goal of promoting accessibility to permaculture. To lower the barrier to entry for sustainable urban farming, the Plantos Project will collect and analyze environmental plant health data to provide end-users with easy-to-implement techniques for increasing crop output. A successful implementation of Plantos will result in users capable of conducting a sow-to-harvest process of a crop with little to no institutional knowledge of farming. Success of the project will be tested and measured through the amount of users obtained and crop yield results per a user.

Design Criteria

The prototype product will need to meet these requirements:

Sensor

• Network connection
• data collection
• data push cloud db
• wireless
• waterproof
• compact

Application

• user creation/authentication
• device pairing
• view existing paired devices
• graphical individual sensor analytics

Implementations

The Plantos Project will be driven by a two-part prototype:

1. Product Package - Wireless sensor used to collect environmental data, connected to a mobile application that provides insights to plant health and care
2. Media Package - Documentary focused on the process of creating the sensor/app, explaining reasons of thought, struggles, success along the process.

Product Package

The Product package is comprised of three components

1. IoT sensor
2. Mobile application
3. Timeseries ML Model

IoT Sensor

Hardware

The sensor is built of out of a RaspberryPi Pico microcontroller connected to:

• Adafruit STEMMA Soil Sensor - I2C Capacitive Moisture Sensor
• Waterproof 1-Wire DS18B20 Digital temperature sensor
• Strain Gauge Load Cell - 4 Wires - 1Kg

NEEDS TO BE OUTLINED

• waterproofing
• power

Software

The sensor is programmed to run a python script for network connection, collecting sensor inputs, and triggering API calls.

Media Package

Future Implications

• industrial farming
  • Lora
• Spectroscopy
• marketplace