Ingadi Flower Farm is working with the Linux Foundation, LF Edge, Open Horizon, IBM, HP, Inc. SoftServe, and Seeed (yes there are three “E”s) to develop an open-source Smart Agriculture (Smart Ag) solution. Towards the end of 2020, Bill Rowley (Ingadi Flower Farm) agreed to take on the project to get things rolling. Since then he has taken on the role of chairperson of the project. The Open Horizon Smart Agriculture Special Interest Group project page can be found at: https://wiki.lfedge.org/display/OH/Open+Horizon+Smart+Agriculture+SIG
Open Horizon will have a partner Blog for this project at: https://wiki.lfedge.org/pages/viewrecentblogposts.action?key=OH. IBM will also have a partner Blog focusing on the technical side of the project at: https://developer.ibm.com/components/open-horizon/blogs/. And, of course, Ingadi Flower Farm will have a partner Blog focusing on the farming implementation side of the project.
Our first use case focuses on growing a small, yet diverse, set of crops including tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, peppers, herbs, and flowers. Initially, we will monitor soil moisture in a 10ft X 20ft hoop house. Hoop houses are also known as high tunnels or greenhouses. But they are not greenhouses because hoop houses are designed to extend the growing season. Whereas greenhouses create a year-round growing environment that is temperature-controlled.
We plan on using Seeed sensors, RasberryPI on the edge, in the hoop houses. An HP gateway server running Ubuntu 20.04 connected wirelessly to the RasberryPI will be set up in the office to store, manage and process the data.