An Open Dataset of Sensor Data from Soil Sensors and Weather Stations at Production Farms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a publicly available dataset of soil and weather sensor data collected over five months from farms, enabling research on agricultural environmental conditions and their impact on farming practices.

Contribution

It provides one of the first open datasets of rural agricultural sensor data, addressing data scarcity and supporting environmental and crop yield studies.

Findings

Correlation between soil moisture and weather patterns

Insights into rain absorption in soil

Potential for improved fertilizer management

Abstract

Weather and soil conditions are particularly important when it comes to farming activities. Study of these factors and their role in nutrient and nitrate absorption rates can lead to useful insights with benefits for both the crop yield and the protection of the environment through the more controlled use of fertilizers and chemicals. There is a paucity of public data from rural, agricultural sensor networks. This is partly due to the unique challenges faced during the deployment and maintenance of IoT networks in rural agricultural areas. As part of a 5-year project called WHIN we have been deploying and collecting sensor data from production and experimental agricultural farms in and around Purdue University in Indiana. Here we release a dataset comprising soil sensor data from a representative sample of 3 nodes across 3 production farms, each for 5 months. We correlate this data with the weather data and draw some insights about the absorption of rain in the soil. We provide the dataset at: https://purduewhin.ecn.purdue.edu/dataset2021.