A Web-Server-Embedded Information Monitoring System for Fruit Farm

Fruit farm productivity is greatly influenced by environment change and management level. In recent decade, real-time environment monitoring has become to an essential tool in agricultural automation. A web-server-embedded information monitoring system was developed to dynamically monitor air/soil environment and plant image in local or remote area for fruit farm management. As a test, a WWAN node system and a WLAN node system each with four CCD cameras and eight sensors including air temperature, relative humidity, CO2 concentration, solar radiation, soil temperature, soil moisture, soil conductivity, and soil water potential were developed and deployed at a Jujube farm in Aksu, Xinjiang and communicated with an information server in Beijing using CDMA service with IPsec-based VPN connection. After a one-year testing, the fruit tree images and environment data were dynamically, accurately, wirelessly, remotely collected by the system with 26 W electricity consumption. Therefore, the system is an available instrument to digitalized production management for fruit farm.