An integrated approach for automatic farm monitoring system

Monitoring systems are commonplace in many areas of industry; however farms as a general rule are a minority for this statistic. One of the primary reasons for this trait is the cost of installing the supporting infrastructure owing to the large land area farms occupy. This paper introduces a new architecture for integration of a monitoring system into farming environments. This architecture is put forward as a solution to the inadequacy of traditional architectures when used in a farming environment. Farms consist of various elements which are constantly changing state; for example opening and closing gates, water trough levels, feed levels etc. Monitoring the status of these elements automatically reduces the workload of a typical farmer, as well as providing benefits such as real-time monitoring, alerts and statistical analysis. The proposed architecture is extensible and attempts to use existing infrastructures present on a typical farm. The monitoring system can integrate with existing infrastructure in two independent ways. The first is the infrastructure for powering the system, and the second is the means of communicating between nodes connected to the system.