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Cisco has delivered an IoT sensor system to a farm in Tanzania
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It uses a low power RF technology called LoRaWAN
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The system will "listen" to the plants and data on the soil, climate and more
Coffee, the jitter juice that fuels many people’s days, doesn’t just appear like magic on your counter top. The cupped lightning isn’t just bought at a coffee shop or the supermarket, it has to be ground, roasted and grown first.
Obviously, being grown is the first stage. Many of the countries where coffee is grown are located in the tropics in the region of the Bean Belt. East African country Tanzania, however, is among the 20 largest coffee-producing countries in the world, producing 30,000 to 40,000 metric tons of java a year.
To keep the coffee production flowing, Cisco is working with the ConSenso Project, a coalition of Tanzanian espresso farmers and Italian plant researchers with the aim of using long range wide area network (LoRaWAN) radio frequency (RF) based IoT to “listen” to the coffee plants on one plantation.
LoRaWAN is an unlicensed, low-power, wide-area networking protocol that happens to uses three different frequency bands in Tanzania.
While the technology wouldn't necessarily be good if you were trying to track coffee moving across Africa or the world, it's totally fine for collecting data on stationary plants at a farm.
To that end, the Tunasikia farm in Utengule, Tanzania, has been fitted with 65 solar-powered sensors that capture a wealth of data on soil, sun, climate, carbon capture, insects and the plants’ electrical energy fields, which can reveal their well-being and needs.
After preliminary on-site analysis, the data — six months’ worth so far — is sent to Florence, Italy, for further study, with support from Cisco cloud, networking and security technologies.
The technology is being used to help farmers know when to irrigate the farm and how much water needs to be used.
“Due to climate change, the growers in Tanzania are facing a reduction in the rainy season,” said Camilla Pandolfi of PNAT, a think tank of plant scientists and technology designers based in Florence. “So, they are irrigating to ensure that the plants flower at the right time and give the beans time to ripen. That means a lot of water is used.”
The IoT push could help reduce the amount of water that is used needlessly.
Of course, your morning cup of joe actually uses 140 liters of water in the journey from plant to cup, but don't worry about that little detail. More coffee, please.