49 Universities Council on Water Resources Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education Issue 171, Pages 49-62, December 2020 Development of a Pilot Smart Irrigation System for Peruvian Highlands Santiago Guevara1, Yogang Singh1,2, Austin Shores1, Juan Mercado3, Mauricio Postigo3, Jose Garcia1, and *Brittany Newell1 1Purdue Polytechnic School of Engineering Technology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA; 2KU Leuven Department of Mechanical Engineering, Belgium; 3School of Electronics Engineering Universidad Nacional San Agustin Arequipa, Peru; *Corresponding Author Abstract: With growing developments in the technology of cloud storage and the Internet of Things, smart systems have become the latest trend in major agricultural regions of the world. The Arequipa and Caylloma provinces of Peru are highly productive agricultural areas that could benefit from these technologies. This region has low precipitation, generally less than 100 mm per year. Electricity is not available in most of the agricultural fields, limiting the types of irrigation methods and technologies that can be supported. Currently, 20 ponds supplied by water runoff from the Andean glaciers are used for irrigating approximately 545 hectares of land in the Majes district (Caylloma province). In order to develop optimal techniques for water irrigation in Arequipa and improve the infrastructure, there is a need for development of a smart water irrigation system applicable to the existing conditions in the region. The current study proposes a pilot smart water irrigation framework comprised of a drip irrigation module, wireless communication module, and a sensor network for intelligently regulating water flow from the cloud. In this study, a TEROS 12 soil moisture sensor is connected to a Digi XBee wireless module for collecting measurements of volumetric water content, temperature, and electrical conductivity, which are sent through a secure IP gateway to the cloud. A user-friendly web interface is available for end-users to access and analyze real-time data. The proposed framework is easily implementable, low-cost, and is predicted to conserve water through optimization of irrigation cycles based on a set moisture threshold. Keywords: volumetric water content, Internet of Things, soil moisture sensor, microcontroller, irrigation efficiency rrigation is crucial for the economy, poverty and wheat (Gelles 2000). Until the late 1980s, a reduction, and food security in the Peruvian lack of effective irrigation in the Arequipa district Ihighlands, leading to a need for sustainable of Peru led to poor vegetation growth (Stensrud use of water (Davis et al. 2009; McCready et al. 2016). Local farmers in the Arequipa region most 2009). The recession of the Peruvian glaciers commonly use flood irrigation which leads to is estimated to have a significant impact on thewaste of agricultural water and ineffective use of downstream ecosystem and communities (Vuille natural resources (Gurovich and Riveros 2019). et al. 2008). Glacier meltwater runoff buffers the The irrigation infrastructure in Peru is defined by water shortage caused by low precipitation during the agricultural land and water resources, with the dry season in the Peruvian highlands (Kaser 5.5 million hectares in use, of which 3.75 million et al. 2003). Water used for irrigation accounts hectares utilize rainfed agriculture and 1.75 million for 80% of water usage for this region (Maos hectares use water reserves like lakes, ponds, 1985). The Arequipa district of Peru benefits fromand reservoirs (Huamanchumo et al. 2008). The high land fertility and favorable temperatures for irrigation infrastructure in Arequipa suffers from agriculture, leading to cultivation of crops such limited measurement of the actual performance, as grapes, avocados, quinoa, onion, garlic, corn, improper scheduling, low precipitation of 100 UCOWR Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education Development of a Pilot Smart Irrigation System for Peruvian Highlands 50 mm per year, lack of power sources, and proper constant wind, very low humidity, and extreme logistic management (Netherly 1984; Ertsen variations in diurnal and seasonal temperatures, 2010). This creates an immediate requirement for using a fuzzy-logic based smart agriculture a low-cost, intelligent irrigation schedule coupled system. Nesa Sudha et al. (2011) proposed two with an optimized irrigation system to manage the different energy conservation mechanisms that available water for irrigation, improve crop yield, have been analyzed based on the Time Division and optimize the quality of the yield. Therefore, Multiple Accesses scheduling plan for automatic the goal of this work is to develop an integral irrigation systems. Both methods provided a better solution using a microcontroller and wireless performance in simulation scenarios compared communication modules for an autonomous, low- to other conventional methods used in smart cost smart irrigation system. Purdue University irrigation systems. In the last decade, ZigBee has students and faculty, in collaboration with faculty gained a lot of popularity as a communication from Universidad Nacional San Agustin (UNSA), protocol to transfer important information, Peru, under the Purdue Center for the Environment, such as flow and pressure readings for use in C4E, and the Arequipa Nexus Institute, developed smart irrigation decision making. This protocol the testing of the pilot smart irrigation system may use the digicloud as a possible interface to presented in this article in order to drive forward transfer important data to and from edge to the the development of low-cost, high-tech agricultural cloud (Foster et al. 2008). Prathibha et al. (2017) systems for the local Arequipa region. proposed an IoT based smart irrigation system This paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, based on the ZigBee communication protocol to literature regarding the use of intelligent techniques monitor and control a set of sensors and actuators and Internet of Things (IoT) framework in irrigation assessing the water needs of crops. A similar study systems in the last decade is discussed. Section 3 conducted by Usha Rani and Kamalesh (2014) provides details of the design and development used an Arduino microcontroller to monitor a of the proposed smart irrigation system and the smart irrigation setup. The studies proved that collaboration between Purdue University and ZigBee has been an effective tool in optimizing UNSA. Section 4 contains the details of the labor and water costs on agricultural land. A review experiments conducted in the laboratory and of the use of ZigBee communications has been Peruvian highlands for the designed smart irrigation conducted by Zhou et al. (2009) by investigating system. As a part of this experimental validation, large scale data assimilation using a ZigBee Section 5 contains a discussion about the outcomes protocol across a large field area. Valente et al. from the experimental study. Section 6 summarizes (2007) investigated multi-hop networking across the work and presents the conclusions. a larger agricultural land using a ZigBee protocol and Multifunctional Probes (MFPz). To make Literature Review the agricultural systems smarter there is a need to acquire accurate data, in addition to having an Advancements in IoT during the last decade effective communication protocol. Towards this have led to a boom in the agricultural sector in effort, a few studies (Kim et al. 2008; Gutiérrez which a combination of IoT devices, control et al. 2013; Veeramanikandasamy et al. 2014) approaches, and cloud computing has improved have presented site-specific data transmission the effectiveness of agriculture and irrigation. approaches for smart irrigation systems, to ensure Abdullah et al. (2016) conducted a study on a that water use efficiency is increased through the Smart Agriculture System (AgriSys) that could use of intelligent approaches and automation of analyze an agricultural environment and intervene drip irrigation systems. The proposed approach in to maintain optimized productivity. The system this study combines the communication protocol dealt with general agricultural challenges such as approach of ZigBee as seen in Prathibha et al. temperature, humidity, pH, and nutrient support. (2017) and the data transmission approach of Additionally, the system dealt with the desert Kim et al. (2008) to develop an IoT based smart specific challenges of dust, infertile sandy soil,irrigation system for the Peruvian highlands to Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education UCOWR 51 Guevara et al. improve productivity and conserve water in water- In order to make the proposed system shown in deprived agricultural lands. Figure 1 low-cost and easy to replicate, off the shelf components were specified, along with common Design and Methodology sensors and popular microcontrollers which have open source technical support available online. The initial design of the smart irrigation system The authors took into account the availability of was prototyped in a laboratory with the intent that it components in the local Arequipa region to design would be replicated and expanded at Peruvian field the current setup at a cost affordable for local sites, as demonstrated in this work. The proposed farmers, compared to the current off the shelf, solar system incorporated three major design factors: 1) powered irrigation systems (Wazed et al. 2017). low-cost, 2) autonomy, and 3) replicability. The Such systems