Low cost weather station for climate-smart agriculture

Abstract

Climate-smart agriculture is one of the techniques that maximizes agricultural outputs through proper management of inputs based on climatological conditions. Real-time weather monitoring system is an important tool to monitor the climatic conditions of a farm because many of the farms related problems can be solved by better understanding of the surrounding weather conditions. There are various designs of weather monitoring stations based on different technological modules. However, different monitoring technologies provide different data sets, thus creating vagueness in accuracy of the weather parameters measured. In this paper, a weather station was designed and deployed in an Edamame farm, and its meteorological data are compared with the commercial Davis Vantage Pro2 installed at the same farm. The results show that the lab-made weather monitoring system is equivalently efficient to measure various weather parameters. Therefore, the designed system welcomes low-income farmers to integrate it into their climate-smart farming practice.