Smart feeding in farming through IoT in silos

Abstract

Smart farming practices are of utmost importance for any economy to foster its growth and development and tackle problems like hunger and food insecurity and ensure the well-being of its citizens. However, such practices usually require large investments that are not affordable for SMEs. Such is the case of expensive weighing machines for silos, while the range of possibilities of the Internet of Things (IoT) could intensively reduce these costs while connecting the data to intelligent Cloud services, such as smart feeding systems. The paper presents a novel IoT device and methodology to monitor quantity and quality of grains in silo by estimating the volume of grains at different time instants along with temperature and humidity in the silo. A smart feeding system, implemented via a virtual organization of agents, processes the data and regulates the grain provided to the animals. Experimental on-field measurements at a rabbit farm show the suitability of the proposed system to reduce waste as well as animal diseases and mortality.