A Women’s Empowerment Opportunity
Problem Statement
Sri Lanka, being an island nation predicted to be the second-worst-affected by Climate Change, has faced volatile environmental conditions in recent years. This affects the cultivation and development of mushroom farming as a cash-crop industry. The best conditions to grow mushrooms are between the temperature of 20°C to 30°C and in a highly humid atmosphere. The SARU project has developed a specialized kit to strictly maintain such a controlled environmental condition.
- Most mushroom farmers cultivate mushrooms indoors.
- Manually monitoring and controlling the environment is extremely time-consuming – successful farmers have to check each chamber as much as every hour.
- Trying to predict and set timer-based activation of heating, air conditioning, and humidity controllers are imprecise and regularly leads to sub-optimal variations towards both extremes.
Solution
Achieving the maximum potential yield from a given mushroom house requires a step by step process to optimize humidity and temperature, depending on each growth stage. This challenge lends itself well to an automated solution.
Dialog, together with the University of Ruhuna and the University of Moratuwa developed fully-automated low-cost IoT sensors and actuators for protected enclosures. These enable farmers to automate, monitor, and control mushroom cultivation activities over their smartphones, from any location and at any time. These affordable and automated agricultural kits allow farmers to accelerate agricultural productivity and enhance the quality of their crops.
For example, should humidity drop below a defined threshold perhaps due to changing external conditions, the farmer gets an alert/ notification on his/her mobile even as the system automatically actuates “misters” (devices to create a fine mist) to a calculated level so as to achieve the desired humidity level. The farmer can also choose to only make manual interventions on receiving notifications from the system, should he or she desire more control, or override the automated interventions too. Similarly, all other automated aspects of the system, such as temperature sensors and controllers, can be controlled in the same way.
Benefits
The SARU IoT platform connects sensors and actuators while remotely controlling and monitoring the activities, with a monitoring panel accessible via smartphones. Further, agricultural know-how for regular operations (i.e. fertilizer application, water management, assessing growth, and pest and disease identification) will be available at the farmer’s fingertips through the use of mobile technology. Being cloud-connected, it is possible for Dialog to push out real-time rapid updates or interventions to respond to “Black Swan” or unprecedented phenomena in agricultural operations that could potentially have a national level significance.
