Toward a Cost-Effective Smart Crop Health
Monitoring System
Sean Wallinger, Joseph Meier, Kyle Boatright, Haitham Abu Ghazaleh, Sotirios Diamantas, Rajesh Vuddandam
Mayfield College of Engineering Tarleton State University Texas A&M University System Stephenville, TX 76402, USA
{sean.wallinger, joseph.meier, kyle.boatright, abughazaleh, diamantas, vuddandam}@tarleton.edu
Abstract—In this research we have investigated and imple-
mented smart-connected and cost-effective technologies that can
aid with the crop management. In particular, we have installed
nodes with various sensors in several parts of a Green house
to supervise environmental and lighting conditions as well as
to monitor the growth of plants. Furthermore, the overall
monitoring system further includes a central access node for
accumulating the sensory data that can also be accessed remotely
for further analysis. The data collected from this research will be
used in determining the optimal placement of sensors within the
Green house, their performance as well as the strategies to be
followed for minimizing the growth rate of plannts while at the
same time maximizing their health. Finally, we have integrated
all sensors input data into a Graphical User Interface.
Index Terms—Wireless Sensor Networks, Data Analytics, In-
ternet of Things, Precision Agriculture Management
2023 IEEE MetroCon | 979-8-3503-1733-6/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/METROCON59008.2023.10340159
I. I NTRODUCTION
The world’s population continues to rise and is expected
to surpass 9.0 billion people by the year 2050. This growth
will further drive the increase in demand for food and nutrition
supplied by the agriculture industry. However, there are several
factors that could hinder the process of increasing the rate of
crop production and farming for meeting these rising demands
such as limited land space, limited resources (e.g., water and
soil nutrients), limited skilled workforce, and the changing in
the environmental conditions. The introduction of existing and
engineering technologies into the agriculture systems can aid
with addressing many, if not all, of these constraints [1]. These
solutions further have the potential to improve the yields from
crops and farming in a cost-effective and efficient manner [2].
Some of these technologies include the use of wireless sensor
networks deployed at strategic locations for collecting sensory
data to a central database for further analysis and facilitated
by the Internet of Things architecture [3], [4]. The region has
been quite slow and reluctant to adopt such solutions into the
agricultural process due to various challenges. Some of these
concerns are the additional costs that the solutions will intro-
duce into the existing process [5], along with not foreseeing
the benefits gained from utilizing these technologies. Thus,
any solution presented to the agricultural community must be
able to demonstrate the benefits gained from such investments,
while being easily adopted in the field (Castrignano, et al.
2020).
The aim of this research is to investigate the technologies
and innovative solutions that can aid with better and efficient
crop health monitoring and focusing on an agricultural process
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that is local to the state of Texas. Many of these solutions may
need to be tailored to the specific type of crop, as well as being
region-specific. The range of research activities involved in
this research include developing the monitoring system using
wireless sensor networks [6] and precision cameras that are
either stationary or mounted on aerial drones [7], along with
developing the infrastructure for accumulating the imagery
and sensory data collected by the sensors in the field. In
addition, a platform will be established for presenting the
data and information to the operators (e.g., farmers) in a
meaningful format [8]. This solution will serve as a platform
for supporting precision agriculture management by employing
machine learning for smart detection and decision-making [9]
that will be investigated in future works. The data collected
from the crop health monitoring system can further be used
to carry out extensive analysis and impact studies on certain
conditions [10], either offline or in real-time. Another use of
this solution would be in automating and mechanizing labor-
intensive tasks that can enhance the quality and efficiency of
the agricultural process, such as the system developed by the
authors in [11].
II. BACKGROUND W ORK
The need for an efficient crop health monitoring system has
been recognized [12] and addressed by many researchers and
for the purpose of maintaining a sustainable process, as well as
for optimizing the utilization of resources in the crop farming.
In this research, the main goal is to create cost-efficient nodes
that have an array of sensors so that a farmer may collect
data that can provide some insights on the crop conditions.
Examples of previous works that have attempted to meet such
goals include [13] whereby a framework had been developed
for monitoring the crop growth and diseases and focusing
on collecting temperature, humidity, PH, and soil moisture
measurements in an outdoor farm. Another similar solution
had been proposed by the authors in [14]. However, these
works did not address the hardware and cost-effectiveness of
their solution. The work by [15] have further shown how to
incorporate the IoT cloud solution for remote and multi access
to the sensory data, which is a desired feature in any crop
health monitoring system and one that we seek to incorporate
into our own solution.
The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in crop
health monitoring systems have been proposed in many of the
previous works due to their versatility and ability to cover
large field areas and in outdoor crops [16]. Examples of
such work include [17]–[19], that have shown how UAVs
with image processing techniques can be used to extract
vegetation conditions of the crop fields and to identify any
crop irregularities. However, such solutions are only capable
of monitoring a limited set of conditions and can be quite
costly. In [20], a multi-modal system was proposed that is
implemented using a set of stationary IoT sensor nodes along
with a UAV for collecting various sensory data.
III. M ETHODS AND R ESULTS
The overall crop health monitoring system consisted of the
following hardware and software solutions (Figs. 1-2):
• 12 sensor nodes that are controlled by a Raspberry Pi
Pico microcontroller. They are powered by a rechargeable
battery with the option of including a solar panel with the
node. Each node is configured to collect the desired mea-
surements every 20 minutes and communicated wirelessly
to a main collector node. These sensors were developed
to measure the following:
– Ambient temperature
– Humidity
– Object (leaf) temperature
– Light intensity
– Light color spectrum intensity
– UV intensity
– CO2
– VPD (Vapor Pressure Deficit)
– PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation) incidence
• A single Raspberry Pi 4 computer that acts as the main
data collector hub at site that would wirelessly connect
with the other sensor nodes at site. The unit is powered
by a main power source and would ideally require a wired
ethernet connection, but wireless internet connectivity is
also possible
• An interface (e.g., dashboard) that would allow for easy
remote access to the data via the Internet along with
displaying a visual summary of the collected data
Each sensor node was connected to a set of 4 different
sensors, along with a battery charging circuit. In particular:
• TC34725 RGB light color sensor for detecting the amount
of light intensity with its red, green and blue light
compositions.
• MLX90614 non-contact infrared temperature sensor
module for measuring the temperature of an object which
in our case is the plant leaf.
• ENS160+AHT21 module which is a combination of two
sensors for measuring the ambient carbon dioxide (using
the ENS160 sensor), as well as the ambient temperature
and relative humidity (using the AHT21).
• LTR390 ultraviolet sensor module for measuring UV light
levels which can return a measure for the UV index in
the range of 0 to 20. The same module also includes an
ambient light sensor.
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IV. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK
At the conclusion of this research, we have successfully de-
ployed our 12 sensor nodes at the Eden Green crop site and our
initial tests of the system had confirmed that the solution has
met our desired aims for this research. We plan on improving
our Graphical User Interface (GUI) as well as providing more
functionality for the user to monitor the various senors. In
addition, we plan on developing Machine Learning algorithms
for the purpose of automating anomaly detection in any of the
sensors or in any parts of the green house. As a future work,
our research plan is to use autonomous ground robots to aid
to the picking of plants by navigating autonomously through
corridors and avoiding obstacles.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We are further grateful to Eden Green for the opportunity to
implement and test our system prototype at their greenhouse
site. This project was funded by Tarleton State University’s
2023 Presidential Excellence in Research Scholar’s (PERS)
grant.
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 (a) (b) (c)

(d) (e) (f)

Fig. 1. (a) Set of sensors used in each sensor node; (b) Sensor nodes with their encasings; (c) Initial installation of the senor nodes at site; (d) Revised
installation of the senor nodes at site; (e) Pair of sensor nodes installed along a single vertical column; (f) Placement of Sensor nodes in each aisle pair.

(a) (b)

Fig. 2. (a) Example of database file with measurements collected from MLX90614 sensor; (b) Example of a time series plot of the collected measurements
using the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

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