Sustainable Smart Aquaponics Farming Using IoT and Data Analytics

Introduction

India is a country with vivid distribution of land and less availability of water for domestic and agricultural purposes. In need of a good alternative against food and environmental problems Aquaponics farming method approach guarantees to be an amazing alternate. Therefore, it is worth exploring how a Cloud-based Sustainable Smart Aquaponics farming using IOT-based predictive analytics affiliates the classical traditional farming methods for efficient growth and information utilization.

Aquaponics is a symbiotic system which enables aquatic life and plants to coexist in a closed loop system. Aquatic animals produce nutrients rich by-product (Ammonia) of their waste which is used by plants as fertilizer. Nitrifying microorganism (Nitrosamines) converts the ammonia to nitrite. Another nitrifying microorganism (Nitro-bacteria) then converts the nitrite to nitrate. The water becomes high in nitrate content, which is the food for plants, but is harmful to the aquatic animals. Plants are grown in a grow media with a constant supply of this water. The plants successively assimilate the nutrients, reducing or eliminating the toxicity of the water that was harmful to the aquatic animal. The water, now clean, is returned to the aquatic animal surroundings and the cycle continues (Hussain et al., 2013). Thus, this nutrient removal not only cleans or improves water quality for the aquatic animals but also reduces the overall water consumption. Water is added externally to compensate for the water loss from soaking up by the plants or evaporation. Several mechanical and biological processes such as heating, pumping, filtering etc. are involved in this system. The data analytics and sensor technology allow to setup optimum conditions for both plants and fish unites, thus ensuring high productivity and enhancing resource efficiency.

Researches over the decades have evolved basic form of aquaponics into modern food production systems of today. Initially, in 1980s, most attempts to integrate hydroponics and aquaculture had very few successes. The 1980s and 1990s advances in the system design were noticed: bio-filtration and the identification of the ideal fish-to-plant ratios led to the generation of closed systems that allowed the recycling of water and nutrient build-up for plant growth. In its early aquaponics systems, North Carolina University (United States of America) manifested that the consumption of water in an integrated system was just 5 percent of that used in pond culture for growing plants (Somerville et al., 2014). This invention among other key initiatives pointed to the compatibility of integrated aquaculture and hydroponic systems for growing vegetables and raising fish, particularly in arid and water scarce regions. Although since 1980's, aquaponics is in use, still it is a relatively new method to produce food with a small number of researches and practitioner hubs worldwide with limited aquaponics experience (Somerville et al., 2014). The aquaponics system has certain weaknesses as described in a United Nations Food and Agriculture report, the system is knowledge intensive and researchers around the globe are trying to make the system more sustainable and efficient, the system is expensive to start-up, it is energy and resource demanding, requires daily maintenance and has fewer management choices compare to agriculture and aquaculture. Traditionally, such systems can be replaced and managed by making this system automated. This automated system includes three sections: production process at the bottom that is sensors, actuators, hardware, etc. while the second section, enterprise resource planning systems for managing data includes Data-Acquisition system and Mobile-based Application. The last section is a Photovoltaic System for making system sustainable by using renewable energy. These sections reflect the characteristics of information of the automated system such as requirements for real-time, frequency of transmission, data-acquisition, and other requirements.

By analyzing the features of each section, the enhancement which can be created by IOT can be observed. The IOT is defined as the connecting of physical things to the internet which makes it feasible to access remote sensor data and manage the physical world from distance (Karimanzira & Rauschenbach, 2019). Furthermore, it would be precipitous to not use the technologies being developed that pull in data, from smart sensors to satellites that can be crunched using diverse cloud-based analytic software program gear such as artificial intelligence, to make aquaponics operations more efficient and eco-friendly..