IoT based Animal Trespass Identification and Prevention System for Smart Agriculture

Unlike the developed countries, there are several problems faced by the Indian farmers. One of the major problems dealt by the Indian farmers is the trespassing of animals into their agricultural fields. Animal Trespassing is a common phenomenon especially in farmlands near forest and hilly areas. There are a lot of cases where animals trespassed the farmlands and had destroyed the crops, causing great losses and distress to farmers. The most affected where poor farmers, who depend completely on farming for their income. This being a threat to many farmers, considering the loss that they would incur. Many of the farmers are dependent on government’s compensation, where getting compensation from government is a highly tiring and tedious process, and also in most of the cases the compensation paid by the government would be much lesser when compared to the losses suffered by the farmers. So, in order to prevent such animal trespasses, farmers use few traditional methods like bursting crackers, building trenches, building electrical fences, etc., where the efficiency is low and also the animals are harmed. So, there is a need for an innovative animal trespass prevention system that is efficient and also not harmful for the animals. With the rapid growth and penetration of technology, it is easy and cost efficient to use the existing modern techniques in technology to deal with animal trespass into the farmland. Considering the growth of IoT technology and its compatibility with agricultural use cases makes it one of the best options to build agricultural tools and devices. The Proposed work is based on IoT Technology, which is a cost-effective Arduino based IoT prototype that would enable the end user (The Farmer) to protect and monitor his/her cropland remotely using various sensors and IoT hardware modules to deal with the problems of animal trespassing into the fields, with better efficiency, without harming the animals and hence prevent any major losses. It is a combination of many individual hardware components and modules integrated together. The project detects animal motion with the help of a PIR sensor, if animal motion is detected, a pair of parallelly placed Ultrasonic sensors look up for the presence of animal within a particular zone near to the border of the farmland, if an animal is detected in the zone, then the buzzer makes noise to chase away the animal, and the GSM Module sends an alert message to the user (Farmer) about the animal trespass. The Farmer can request for the photos of the field whenever required and this is highly helpful in knowing the field situation better, during an animal trespass, as he can see live photos captured from the field, and the photos are sent to him/her via Telegram. The ESP32 Camera Module is completely responsible for executing the image capturing task, where it captures the field image, sends it to the user (Farmer), and also captures the field image and stores a local backup in the SD card mounted to it. The project prototype that is built is functioning completely normal as per the sequence of functions mentioned above and the test run results are obtained as expected.