SoilSense: An IoT-Based Soil Health Monitoring System for Smallholder Farmers in Bangladesh to Support Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

Smallholder farmers have limited access to soil diagnostics and scientific advice in a timely fashion, which results in ineffective use of fertilizers, deteriorating soil health and decreasing crop yields. In a bid to solve these problems, this paper proposes SoilSense, a low-cost, IoT-enabled soil health monitoring system to assist precision agriculture in resource-limited environments. The system consists of an ESP32 microcontroller with DHT11 sensor (to measure temperature and humidity), an analog rain sensor, and a capacitive soil moisture sensor that measure real-time environmental parameters. Readings are shown on an I2C LCD and sent to a Telegram bot which helps to monitor in real-time as well as to keep track of long-term logging. The collected data is processed by a machine learning model developed using regression in order to predict the necessary levels of soil nutrients Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K). Based on these predictions, the system can produce localized soil improvement advice in Bengali based on the ‘Union Sahayika’ agricultural recommendations. SoilSense provides a scalable and easy to use solution to enhance soil management and decision-making to smallholder farmers, aligning with SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 15 (Life on Land) to achieve sustainable agriculture.