Journal of Agronomy and Field Innovations

Background: tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is the second most grown horticultural crop in the world as its yearly production exceeds 180 million tons. However, conventional irrigation contributes to 80% of the overall agricultural water consumption thus posing a threat to water shortage in dry and semi-dry areas. Climate change and inefficient water management practices disrupt sustainable tomato farming.
Objective: This paper proposes and tests IoT-based smart irrigation system, which involves real-time soil moisture monitoring, environmental monitoring, cloud computing, and automated water irrigation control, ideal for precision tomato farming.
Methods: The study used a completely randomized block design (CRBD) to compare the conventional flood irrigation (control) versus IoT-based deficit irrigation (treatment) within 24 plots (each of size 400 m²) during the growing season 2023 in subtropical climate.
Results: Introducing IoT-based irrigation technology allowed for decreasing the amount of water used for irrigation of tomato fields from 590 mm to only 385 mm (a decrease of 35%) while being able to raise their harvest from 64.1 t/ha to 78.5 t/ha (an increase of 22.4% in terms of fruit yield). However, it was possible to achieve much greater water-use efficiency due to the advanced irrigation technologies since IoT-based irrigation allowed for getting 0.204 kg/m3 compared to only 0.109 kg/m3 when applied conventional irrigation techniques. In addition to that, automatic irrigation scheduling provided the possibility of getting optimal soil moisture (18-22% of volumetric water content) making it possible to improve crop uniformity significantly enough (P < 0.05).
Conclusion: IoT-assisted precision irrigation helps with increasing water-use efficiency and productivity of tomatoes. Sensor network and cloud platforms integration provides with possibilities of making quick and real-time decisions when pursuing agriculture under climate issues and lack of water.