Demo: https://greenhouse-production.up.railway.app/greenhouse/
**Abstract—**Cloud platforms like AWS have transformed operations across businesses and industries. In this report, I detail how I have leveraged the AWS platform and its services to produce a simple application for keeping track of and maintaining crops growing in a greenhouse. This solution is implemented for personal use, but on a larger scale can be integrated with IoT devices and more cloud services to produce a fully automated greenhouse. The solution, through a series of functions, successfully generates advice to farmers based on user input. The solution was also intended to have functionality to perform diagnostics based on user input to predict nutrient deficiencies in the crops, but the function did not execute properly. The fully deployed application delivers an email notification (powered by Amazon SNS) every time a crop is added to the greenhouse and lets the subscriber know the health status of the crop every time conditions are updated.
**Keywords—**Greenhouse, IoT, Agriculture, AWS
Countless industries have adopted cloud technologies into their operations to benefit from the opportunities for collaboration, scalability, security, data insights, etc. and the agriculture and forestry sector is no different. The agricultural sector is one of the most important ones we have. A census conducted in India in 2011 revealed that 65% of the rural population depend on agriculture for livelihood [1]. Regardless, it is also one of the most challenged sectors with constant vulnerability to instability due to climate change, soil degradation and water scarcity. However, we depend on the wheels in the sector to continue moving for our survival. We depend on a constant, reliable and healthy supply of crops to be delivered to our supermarkets and there are many processes involved in this move from farm to fridge. Processes such as crop production, supply chain management, resource management and sales could be improved through the adoption of cloud technologies.
In this project, I explore the possibilities for improving the crop production process using cloud monitoring and notification services offered by AWS. The scope of this project is maintaining optimal conditions per crop for crops in a greenhouse. The application I have designed keeps a record of the crops growing in the greenhouse which the farmer can update to receive instant notifications via SMS or e-mail to adjust the conditions in the greenhouse and ensure that the crops grow properly. This application also offers diagnostic tests that allow the farmer ****to enter details about the crop's appearance from which it may be determined if the crop has any nutrient deficiencies.
This application of cloud technologies could potentially help prevent diseases in crops and reduce the number of crops lost to common gardening mistakes such as overwatering crops, neglecting soil health, over or underexposure to light and late identification of nutrient deficiency. On a much larger scale, supported by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, smart control systems [2] and Artificial Intelligence (AI), we stand on the precipice of a revolutionary approach to farming involving efficient use of energy and higher yields. Today, high-tech greenhouses are employing the cloud to manage the data recorded by their sensors and processors. Farmers are already using data analytics generated by cloud platforms to optimise their production and save time and money. AWS is the foremost provider of cloud services in the world, offering 200 fully featured services. This vast array of services can be combined to suit business requirements as needed. My goal for developing this application is to illustrate on a small scale all the potential benefits of adopting cloud technology in agriculture and forestry using some of the services offered by AWS including SNS, SES, Lambda and AWS API Gateway
Greenhouses, dubbed the most water efficient solution in the agricultural sector by [2], are controlled environments for growing crops or plants. This allows the plants to grow in a stable environment that is not subject to changes in the weather and other environmental factors. There are many benefits to greenhouse farming for example, you could adjust the temperature and regulate light allowing farmers to grow crops well past their season or to grow crops in regions they are not native to and there is currently an extensive amount of research being conducted to continue to make greenhouses more efficient [1]. The research mainly concerns real-time processing of data processing. In this application, users will be able to create records for all the crops growing in the greenhouse that store information such as planting date, recent weather conditions and any observed issues. The application processes this input to provide basic care advice or alerts about potential problems. These alerts are pushed to the farmer (user) via e-mail or SMS in real-time as a reminder to take action to preserve the crops. That narrows down the functional requirements of this application to a means of collecting user input about the crops, a database to store the data entered, a function to decide what the health status of the crops entered into the table that is capable of taking temperature and moisture as parameters, a simple notification service to send an email with the health status to the farmer/user.
To enable this functionality, I have adopted the use of the following AWS services:
My application, called “My Greenhouse”, is built on the Django framework and I have also developed a custom Python library that performs various diagnostic checks on the crops and detects suboptimal conditions. The farmers are also able to update the crop records with the adjusted conditions or delete the crops entirely.