S Korea Farmers Use Smart Phones To Control Greenhouse Temperature

S Korea Farmers Use Smart Phones To Control Greenhouse Temperature

If you want to monitor and protect your crop in changing weather conditions, help may soon be as close as an app-store – the applications’ store on your smart phone.

South Korean farmers have already started using smart phones to remotely control and monitor plants in their greenhouses, an innovation that can potentially improve yields and reduce labor costs, a senior executive involved in marketing the technology said.

While South Korea is heavily dependent on imported grains, it has a large animal feed processing industry and cultivates fruits and vegetables in thousands of greenhouses spread across the country, which the new technology is aimed at.

Sunshine and protection from freezing winter temperatures are crucial to sustain the crops in labor-scarce and urbanized South Korea where owners drive to their farms at least twice a day to cover or uncover plants with woollen blanket sheets by switching a motor on or off.

By using the new application from a smart phone, farmers are now able to maintain consistent crop temperatures. They remotely cover or uncover their crop inside large greenhouses, Telit Wireless Solutions’ Marketing Director for Asia-Pacific Kyung Jun Lee said in an interview.

There are farmers who drive more than an hour to their greenhouses in the countryside daily, which won’t be required with the smart phone technology, he said.

With field trials already complete, the technology has got government approval and has initially been introduced in the farms for oriental melons in Seongju county.

Seongju in North Gyeongsang province is an agriculture-dominated county and is the biggest oriental melon farming area in South Korea with more than 60,000 greenhouses.

Around 1,000 subscriptions will be finalized by the end of next month and the company plans to introduce it with some modifications for other crops such as watermelons, tomatoes and strawberries.

The smart farm system was developed in the past year with Telit providing the wireless data technology to Disys, a South Korean designer of mobile applications.

Lee said more features have been developed to monitor temperature and humidity on a real time basis through sensors at the greenhouses and those will be offered to farmers in the second quarter.

Since the wireless technology provides video imaging, it can also be used for security and tracking livestock barns in case of the outbreaks of animal diseases such as foot and mouth, he said.

Telit, a subsidiary of wireless technology multinational, Telit Communications, is discussing with its offices elsewhere on potential use of the technology in other countries.