Development and evaluation of a solar powered automated fertigation system

Abstract

Automated fertigation system is a highly advanced system for water and fertilizer administration in irrigated agriculture. It promises the application of water in right quantity along with right fertilizer at right time, thereby reducing fertilizer loss and labour resulting in saving of money with the help of an automated mechanism. The present study was undertaken to develop a timer based automated fertigation system using an FIP and to evaluate the performance of the system. Field evaluation of the developed automated fertigation system was carried out by growing salad cucumber variety ‘Saniya’ in grow bags inside a poly house located at Agricultural Research Station, Anakkayam. A comparative evaluation was carried out between biometric observations and yield parameters of the two sets of crop grown inside the polyhouse, one fertigated automatically with the developed system and the other one with manual fertilizer application and a third group of plants grown in the open field with manual fertilizer application. Data collected was subjected to statistical scrutiny viz., ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and Student-t test. The main crop growth parameters like height of the plant, days to first flowering, days to 50 percentage flowering, days to initial budding, days to first harvest and leaf area index were observed. Yield parameters viz. size of the fruit, number of fruits harvested per plant and average yield were recorded during the study. Values of all these parameters were found to be better for the crops grown inside the polyhouse with automated fertigation compared to the other two. The developed system operates using solar panel generating a power of 250 W on an average along with a battery, which makes the system operations possible up to 4.4 days without sunshine. Hence it can be concluded that the developed automated fertigation system can ensure better yield for salad cucumber variety ‘Saniya’ grown inside the polyhouse.