Monitoring of urban indoor farming. Case study tomboy tomatoes

Abstract

Monitoring of urban indoor farming is an alternative to the traditional farming of outdoor farms that yield a low harvest due to climate change, dependence on rainfall, soil degradation, much water need for irrigation, requires fertilizers, pesticides, prone to soil diseases, plants diseases, pests, erosion, floods etc. Those problems hinder the investment in this type of farming due to risks associated with it. Growing plants indoor, offers benefits such as being practiced on small space, can be done in proximity to the harvest buyers in cities, attracts investments and offer new job opportunities. Those benefits make it suited to urban places. Such farming type is believed to be the farming of the future, and it is attracting the attention of researchers, technology innovators and economic actors. Urban indoor agriculture is practiced largely in developed countries, while developing countries are still lagging behind. However, the rise in technology is stimulating acquisition of indoor farms, which use hydroponic growing system. Rwanda, being one of the developing countries, is embarking on modernizing its agriculture sector. The country is prioritizing the activities of growing vegetables, fruits, and cassava as well as sweet potatoes by means of hydroponic farming technique. This research project is carried out as a contribution to the availability of urban indoor prototype of tomboy tomatoes that can be used in Kigali. Internet of things is applied for the sake of adding monitoring features to the farm. The benefits of combining indoor farming with Internet of things (IoT) are: the possibility of adding devices, such microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators, Wireless module to indoor grow environment in the sake of having a real time farm monitoring and yielding more. This is done using a small space, less water, having a full monitoring of crops nutrients and its growth. In Kigali City, agricultural activities are carried out in valleys and parts of the city, which are less urbanized; a big number of actors do those activities in outdoor setting. Early indoors farms focused on mushrooms growing. However, with the rapid urbanization of the city new initiatives in indoor farming are emerging and are dominated by foreign investors. For instance Holland GreenTech, a company operating in Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya; offers greenhouse among its services (Greentech, 2021). In interview with GreenTech’s receptionist, the company sell v greenhouses with soil based farming to customers in Kigali and other provinces. One greenhouse cost around 8 Million Rwandan Francs as many materials to make them are imported. Although expensive, this is a good sign showing that with the rapid urbanization of the Kigali city, indoor farms will increase in number and will be using Internet of Things technology. This research study has a focus on indoor farming for tomboy tomatoes in urban places, and looks for adding IoT technology to produce an indoor farm prototype. Enabling factors for indoor farming of tomboy tomatoes using IoT in kigali city there is 3G and 4G networks, the availability of potential buyers of tomatoes year-round, investors, labor, materials, water and tanks to keep it. Local research on the use of Internet of things for indoor farming aiming at availing technology based local solutions are still rare. For this reason, this study builds on that background and propose a homegrown technology offering efficient method and proper control of indoor growing environment for tomboy tomatoes. The indoor grow method selected is Ebb and Flow; the environment parameters monitored in this project are Humidity, temperature, PH, nutrients flow, light.