The Robotic Farmer

Demo

About

Why are you participating for Based Africa? Growing up in Africa has given me a profound understanding of the vital role agriculture plays in our community. It is our heritage and main economic activity. We are blessed to be at the backbone of nurturing over 70% of the world's food supply, and that is why I believe we must safeguard it. Witnessing firsthand the challenges faced by farmers and the impact of unpredictable conditions has motivated me to take on this project, with the goal of creating a sustainable solution that supports both farmers and consumers. Additional Features We have incorporated the blockchain infrastructure for sensor data storage.

How it's made

What challenges are you focusing on? 1. Lack of trust and transparency between farm owners, laborers, and supervisors in managing large-scale farms. 2. No proof of proper farming conditions, which can lead to wrongful blame, especially regarding illegal practices like chemical overuse. 3. Limited data-driven decision making due to unreliable manual records. How does your submission address this challenge? Our solution combines IoT technology with blockchain-powered smart contracts to offer real-time monitoring, automated control, and decentralized data storage, creating transparency and security in agricultural management. Data is stored in IPFS for immutability, and we use smart contracts to ensure that new farm condition data is updated regularly, providing traceable, trustworthy proof of all farm operations. Our system uses smart sensors to monitor farm conditions and automates specific processes based on the collected metrics e.g. automatically turning on pumps when rainfall is low and adjusting NPK dosage based on nutrient levels. Via real time monitoring our solution provides legal protection to farmers and transparency to consumers and government institutions responsible. This also protects farm owners from potential fraud by farm supervisors and laborers as they can easily monitor farm conditions and usage of farm recources like water and NPK fertilisers. Our system can prove that crops were grown under proper conditions via decentralized data storage. Automated responses to environmental conditions, like starting pumps during low rainfall, add extra layers of protection and makes farming easier and more productive. Future Decision Making: Data analysis from records helps farm stakeholders make informed decisions about budget allocation, resource usage, and long-term planning. Research Opportunities: Farmers can sell this valuable data to research institutions, agro-tech companies, or universities for analysis, creating new income streams. Challenges we ran into 1. We burnt an arduino boards in the setting up of the hardware, which was quite expensive for us. After the first one burned we bought another Nano UNO bread board which was smaller and cheaper but completed the job. We managed to do the testing and just had to integrate it with our blockchain app for data storage. 2. We never really had a front end developer in our team thus we were disadvantaged but with the use of free templates online and youtube videos we managed to do it, adding the wallet was actually pretty easy due to the documentation on base.org, it saved us a lot of time. Thank you Base! 3. Web 3 being a new technology to learn for us made our job really challenging but with the aid of documentation and recources online we managed to build an onchain app that achieves our goal.