Efficiency improvement of an integrated giant freshwater-white prawn farming in Thailand using a Wireless Sensor Network

Most local freshwater prawn farmers in Thailand are currently relying their prawn production on a traditional farming approach, which requires highly-experienced farm manager, effort and time. By continuing with this inefficient approach, it is hard to improve the productivity, due to two main difficulties: (1) the difficulty in consistently maintaining the quality of pond water and (2) the difficulty in managing the farm system in a cost effective way. In order to improve the efficiency in aquaculture, many previous works suggest the use of wireless sensor technology in maintaining and controlling the quality of pond water as well as in promoting the efficient farm management. However, with its initially high investment, the deployment of such system has not gained much popularity among Thai prawn farmers. Unlike other previous works that mainly focus on the design of a smart aquaculture system without clarifying how much productivity can really be gained from adopting such system, this study aims to investigate the significance of efficiency improvement obtained from adopting wireless sensor technology (or smart farming) over the use of a traditional approach in an integrated giant freshwater-white prawn culture in Thailand environment. Experimental results reveal that with smart prawn farming approach, significant efficiency gain can be achieved from the ability to extend the culture period significantly by 20.3%, leading to larger-size prawns and more than 150% better in profit, when compare with using the traditional approach.