UNN research group secures $110,000 grant for smart agriculture

A research group at the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), High Performance and Intelligence Computing (HiPIC) has secured a $110,000 grant for the development of smart agriculture in Nigeria.

The grant was awarded by the Lacuna Fund which is made of funders like the Rockefeller Foundation, Canada’s International Development Research Centre (CIDRC), Google, among others as an initiative to close the lack of dataset in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Speaking during a 1-day workshop on Sustainable Smart and Integrated Catfish Soilless Farming (Aquaponics) held recently at the university, the Lead Researcher, Dr Collins Udanor, said that the group wrote proposal for the grant having in mind how to deploy Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture, particularly fish farming.

Udanor who is of he department of Computers Science at the university explained that: “the call for proposals was just released in September 2020. After studying it, I assembled a team. We followed the instructions diligently, and improved on our previous proposal.

“We designed and developed mobile fish ponds for tenancy aquaculture, fitted with IoT sensors. We programmed the microcontrollers to work with the sensors, constructed the units and installed them. We built a greenhouse from scratch and bought fingerlings. By the end of May, 2021 our IoT sensors went live.

“We were uploading datasets from the fish ponds to the cloud every 5 seconds. The datasets were parameters showing the states of the fish pond water. They include temperature, turbidity, dissolved oxygen levels, pH levels, ammonia and nitrate. With these datasets coming up to the cloud, we could remotely monitor the state of the ponds.

“We knew when to top up water or when to change the pond water. The sensor readings were important for the survival of the fishes. To the glory of God, we did not lose a single fish in the IoT ponds. So far we have generated over 2 million datasets between May 2021 and January 2022, and are still counting,” he said.

Speaking further on the datasets, a principal collaborator in the project, Dr Nelson Ossai of the Fisheries Science and Aquaculture Research Unit, Department of Zoology and Environmental Biology, UNN revealed that the datasets have been licenced under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attributions.

He also said they have been made available to the global research and agricultural community on the Kaggle dataset repository for machine learning.

Also speaking at the event, the Vice Chancellor of the university, Charles Igwe commended HiPIC for working to advance efforts towards eliminating hunger in Africa.

He noted that the award which was made by the Lacuna Fund For Agriculture, 2020 was to execute a project aimed at developing a Labelled Dataset for an IoT-based Aquaponics Fish Pond Water Monitoring System.

“The research group has developed a mobile model of aquaponics (a combination of aquaculture and plant breeding) system equipped with water quality smart sensors that gather datasets in real time.

“This system promises to open a wide window of food security through increased agricultural productivity as the portability of the system will encourage homestead, urban, and tenant aquaculture,” he added.

The workshop had in attendance about 100 participants, among whom were researchers, farmers and graduate students while over 20 persons joined the workshop virtually.

The participants were thrilled and enlightened by the contents of the workshop. They applauded the organizers on the achievements made in designing, developing and deploying an Internet of Things (IoT)-based mobile aquaponics based system that was able to automatically collect over 2 million datasets for research within six months.

(Daily Sun)