A Scalable Distributed System for Precision Irrigation

The level of adoption of Precision Agriculture (PA) technologies is still very different from one country to another and from one region to another in the same country. A major challenge is to develop PA from a best practice pursued by a minority of enlightened farmers to a widespread practice with sizeable impact on the use of environmental resources. One of the obstacles hindering PA is the lack of quantitative data readily accessible to farmers to guide their daily operations. In this paper, we present the information system developed within project POSITIVE to support and enhance precision irrigation across the whole Emilia-Romagna region. To this purpose, the POSITIVE information system establishes a service transforming satellite and sensor data into biophysical parameters and vegetation indices with full regional coverage. These data are automatically fed into a public irrigation advisory service (Irrinet+) thereby enabling precision irrigation and fertigation on a regional scale. Irrigation maps can be sent as advice to farmers or directly commanded to registered irrigation machines. The architecture of the distributed information system and the open protocols developed to achieve scalability and enable interaction of multiple heterogeneous components are reported in the paper.