Abstract
In the disaster-affected area of Fukushima, farming on consolidated rice paddy fields and protected horticulture areas has recommenced. This is in order to prevent the risk of harmful rumors. The farmers commute from a far distant refuge since the evacuation order has been lifted. In addition, their greenhouses and arable lands are often scattered. This has made it difficult for them to visit their production sites frequently, although some farmers have started to plant new cash crops as farming has restarted. In order to manage this situation, it would be helpful for such farmers to obtain agricultural information without physically visiting the farmland. This would require an inexpensive remote monitoring system which could be easily introduced and adapted according to the farmer’s needs, to provide agricultural information or cultivation history. Commercially available remote monitoring systems are designed to be used throughout the year and are relatively expensive for short-term use, such as during the seedling growth period. Therefore, we devised a remote monitoring system named the “Kayoinougyo Shien system”after the word “Kayoinougyo”that the farmers who commute from their place of refuge or residences far from their farms to the area where farming has restarted. The new technology is based on a commercial IoT prototyping kit with Web API and a messaging application. We demonstrated its capability and usefulness in the greenhouse in the regenerated area of farming in Fukushima. In this study, we evaluated the practicality and effectiveness of the system by adding the functions of data statistics and graphic data notification, and providing data on temperature, humidity, soil moisture content, and photographs taken by IoT camera, to meet the needs of the farmers. The accuracy of the temperature sensor was within ± 1 °C. The error rate of the data notification was less than 1% during the test period. The farmers were able to determine what needed to be done; whether to open the windows of their greenhouses or not, or irrigate their crops, by obtaining data at the required intervals and utilizing it in cultivation. Therefore, we were able to confirm the practicality and effectiveness of this system.
