ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Climate-Smart Food Systems
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1677654
This article is part of the Research TopicBuilding Resilience Through Sustainability: Innovative Strategies In Agricultural SystemsView all 25 articles
Advancing Precision Irrigation Through an Affordable IoT-Enabled Lysimeter for Monitoring Crop Water Requirements
Provisionally accepted
- ICAR-Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Bhopal, India
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Lysimeters are essential tools for quantifying soil water content and evapotranspiration, enabling precise irrigation scheduling. However, the high cost of commercial lysimeters limits their widespread use, particularly for small-scale farmers and researchers. This study presents the development and evaluation of a cost-effective, IoT-enabled weighing lysimeter to measure crop evapotranspiration (ETc) in shallow-rooted crops and to promote sustainability in water management. The system, built with a surface area of 1.38 m² and a one ton single-point platform load cell, integrates soil moisture and temperature sensors at three depths and a waterproof ultrasonic sensor for water drainage measurement. Data were stored locally on an SD card and transmitted to a cloud server using the ThingSpeak IoT platform for real-time remote monitoring. Field validation was conducted with wheat crop during the winter season of 2022-23. The system recorded a total ETc of 331.9 mm during the testing period and demonstrated high accuracy, achieving an R2 value of 0.998 and a resolution of 0.20 mm. The total cost of construction was approximately $709 USD, offering a cost-effective alternative to conventional lysimeter systems. The developed IoT-enabled weighing lysimeter contributes to sustainability by enabling affordable and accurate water monitoring, supporting efficient irrigation scheduling, and fostering resource-conscious agricultural practices for long-term food system resilience.
Keywords: evapotranspiration, IoT, Irrigation Schedulling, Lysimeter, water balance
Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 09 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gupta, Singh and Kumar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: R K Singh, rksinghiinrg@gmail.com
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