Although many kinds of low-cost, commercially available relative humidity (RH) sensors are used in greenhouses, it is not known whether they have sufficient weather resistance in that environment. We tested the weather resistance of 6 kinds of low-cost RH sensors in a tomato production greenhouse for 3 months. At RH > 90%, the values reported by the sensors were reduced by up to 4%. This reduced accuracy can pose problems, since high humidity influences transpiration, condensation, and disease incidence. When low-cost RH sensors are used in greenhouses, it may be necessary to allow for this deterioration.

The monitoring node is one of the most important system components in the remote and automatic measurement of environmental information. Simplicity, flexibility, and affordability are critical in agricultural applications. The objective of this study was to design and develop a low-cost and robust remote environmental monitoring node based on a microcontroller board with a wireless communication module and an over-the-air (OTA) update function for flexible node management. The monitoring system consists of a cloud-based global management subsystem and a local management subsystem for each monitoring node. The node was developed using the Particle Core, reprogrammable Wi-Fi development kit, which fulfills the requirements for monitoring node mentioned above. The performance evaluation of the stability and the OTA update function were conducted under two network conditions: (1) high-speed network and (2) regular mobile 3G-network as actual application setup. The stability and availability test observed over 95% of the “timely measurements”, a completed measurement within the specified time interval, 99.86% for the condition 1 under high-quality network, and 95.02% for the condition 2. The OTA firmware update process was completed in approximately 60 s. We concluded that the developed environmental monitoring node based on a low-cost microcontroller having internal Wi-Fi module and OTA update function has the potential to increase the simplicity, flexibility, and affordability of remote environmental monitoring node in agricultural applications.

Every information source has advantages and disadvantages for delivering certain types of information. However information sources have generally been recognized as tools that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of agriculture as collecting and distributing agricultural information is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. The purpose of this study is to identify factors that explain the variation among farmers in their use of information sources based on household (farm)-level data. The results show that household income, farm size, household size, educational attainment, and off-farm jobs are the most important factors influencing the use of media and personal information sources. The implications of these results are introducing and encouraging more off-farm jobs for farmers. As such, the provincial government and extension agents are recommended to work more effectively to enhance and help farmers diversifying crops and applying technologies. It is also important to improve the quantity and quality of extension services. The results also suggest that adjusting policies for reducing the gap among districts are needed, and farmers’ education should focus on training for agricultural knowledge, social activities, governmental policies, as well as, using informational sources, such as the Internet, computers, etc.

To collect new entries in a custom dictionary for morphological analysis, we analyzed customer vocabulary used in vegetable-product reviews. Key words specific to vegetable-product reviews were chosen on the basis of scores determined by TermExtract software from nouns regarded as customer vocabulary that were not already included in the morpheme basic dictionary. Sixty percent of selected key words represented the product name, including cultivar and brand name. Of customer concepts in which selected key words were represented, 66% were also included in researcher concepts used on the National Agricultural Research Organization’s website. The ratio of researcher concepts to customer concepts categorized by product name was low, whereas those categorized by food functionality and safety were high. These results suggest the importance of product names as new entries in the custom dictionary for morphological analysis; the importance of gleaning product names not only from researcher vocabulary, but also from diverse sources with uniquely identifiable information; and the possibility of efficiently gleaning terms related to food functionality and safety from researcher vocabulary.