A System for Optimizing Fertilizer Dosing in Innovative Smart Fertigation Pipelines: Modeling, Construction, Testing and Control

Smart fertigation is a topic of great interest in the effort to optimize different activities involved in local and extensive agriculture for assisting crops, optimizing production by using wireless technologies, data-processing electronic boards and sensors network. With the advent of Agriculture 4.0, similar to Industry 4.0, Information Communication Technology (ICT), associated with mechatronics, is giving an added value to this technique allowing optimization of water, fertilizers, control of water flow in pipes and period of irrigation. This paper intends to illustrate findings related to an innovative low cost system for assisting crops and achieving an accurate farming by investigating on the design, construction, testing and control of dosing system for liquid and granular fertilizers. Four different dosage systems have been designed, realized and tested with different granular and liquid fertilizers; the analysis of an extensive experimental campaign allows to define the characteristic and the mathematical expressions for each analyzed fertilizer and for each dosage system. The accurate modeling allows to control with extreme precision the realized dosing systems after estimating the quantity of fertilizer which the crop needs by means of the smart fertigation system. The obtained results permit the optimization of the fertilizer dosage in terms of quantity, which at the same time translates into lower production costs, greater environmental sustainability and optimization of production in terms of quantity and quality.