This article is about LoRaWAN smart agriculture technology for farms and ranches.  We’ll go through what LoRaWAN technology is, applications in smart agriculture, and how it works, and then a real basic introduction on how to get started.

LoRaWAN technology is often called an example of IoT or the Internet of Things. In this case, Internet of Things for smart agriculture is a long way range wide area network. This technology is used to monitor assets or conditions by farmers and ranchers. They can use this technology to monitor soil conditions, soil moisture, soil temperature, rainfall, etc.

They can also use it in remote buildings, knowing whether somebody goes into them or whether their doors are opened, or they can monitor fuel tanks, water tanks out in pastures, the locations of cattle by putting tags on them.

LoRa stands for long-range wide area network. This is a wireless network that communicates between sensors and the antenna and then to the internet. LoRaWAN a license-free radiofrequency and enables fairly long-range communication up to five miles in rural areas, maybe two miles in urban areas.

This technology allows you to put the sensors out remotely and then collect that information on an antenna, send it to the internet, and manage it in a way that you can see it either on your cell phone or on your computer. This technology is managed by an organization called LoRa Alliance, a group of individuals and representatives from companies making the equipment and explicitly making sensors and selling them. Once they’re set up on LoRa system, you can use this system to view the data. There are various sensors, soil moisture sensors, temperature sensors, air temperature, relative humidity, and much more that can be set up out in the field.

You can monitor rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, the liquid level in tanks, whether that be a fuel tank or whether that be a water tank for cattle, GPS locations of equipment, livestock movements, building security, and so on.

There’s no operating cost. The tiny sensors operate on small batteries, like diesel batteries, and they’ll last at least two years and maybe longer.

LoRaWAN Gateway for smart agriculture

The gateway requires electricity, and it needs to be connected to the internet. But the key here is that all this data will be readily available on your computer or on your cell phone once you get it set up.

Here are some examples of devices starting with a sample gateway.

LoRaWAN Smart Agriculture Sensors

Now Let’s look at the sensors. They’re all weatherproof so that they can be set up outside again.

If you had temperature and moisture sensors in your fields, you could put a little flag up to know where you’re at so that when you want to go back in and collect them, you know where they’re at. The GPS unit could be installed on a tractor on a four-Wheeler or GPS guidance for cattle. A clear example of Liquid level in tanks would be monitoring water in a field, water tanks, or pastures.

So how does this technology work? Sensors like moisture sensors, temperature, or air sensors are set up remotely in the field and have battery power to transmit signals.

Then you need to have a gateway with electricity and an internet connection to receive that.

Moreover, if you don’t have the internet at that site, for example, let’s say you’re monitoring something 10 miles away. You have to install the gateway away from your farm where there is no electricity or internet there; you can use a cellular 4G or 5G subscription to get the internet. The estimated price would be 25 or $30 a month for the internet subscription, which would be an operating cost.

If there is no electricity there, you set them up using volt batteries and then spending 25 or $30 for a small solar collector to keep the power in that location. So it does work even if you don’t have internet and electricity available.

Data Management in LoRaWAN Smart Agriculture

The data has to be managed. It’s one thing to collect and send to the edge of the field (a LoRaWAN gateway), but you will need some way of managing it. So there are several ones available, like TTN (The Things Network), a free and open-source management system on the internet to manage the data and it’s usable worldwide. It can move the data from the sensors to the internet. It’s not a lot of your work, you have to go through a procedure to set it up, and it will monitor sensors in a minute.

Once the data is sent to the internet, the last thing that has to be done is making it viewable on the internet. So you take that sensor data that come and have many opportunities to visualize that data.

The Choovio sensor monitoring system makes it possible for individuals and companies to visualize the data and see it on cell phones or computers. Still, they can also use this site to have it send a text or email alert message. For example, if the door’s left open or somebody goes into a building, you can get an immediate text or email message. Or, if an animal is in the wrong place, we can get a text message to know that.

We will go through the basic steps for setting up the system on TTN (The Things Network). You have to set up an account to log in to a console on The Things Network. Then you have to create an application that might be like one gateway with five soil moisture and temperature sensors. Then you have to register those devices and add an integration to the application. The integration is a way of viewing that information on the internet. All Gateways and Sensors have UI, which is the unique electronic identification that comes with them and is used to set them up on different Network Servers (in this example, TTN)

LoRaWAN technology is a way to monitor assets and activities freely. The only cost is the setup costs and equipment cost, and monitoring services of your choice, but there is no cost to use it.

As you can see, there’s a lot of opportunities. Basically, the cost to set this up is relatively small. , for a few hundred dollars, we could have everything set up and then be able to get that information and receive it by emails and text information, or simply to look at the internet to see it. Do you have any questions?