Agriculture is remaining to be a strategic sector in Indonesia. Besides its growth, there are also several challenges. Among others is the optimization of the agricultural production system. Practically, Indonesian farmers have improved their own cultivation technique and senses from their long-term accumulated experiences, includes knowledge about climate, weather, soil, crop type, etc. In this study, the author introduced an informatization agricultural supporting system, called the “Agri-eye” in order to improve agricultural production systems by integrating local knowledge and utilization of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Field monitoring system (FMS) is an automatic weather station installed in agriculture field to gather environmental data and forward it to the database server periodically, in addition, farmers can check their field environmental condition in real-time from a mobile phone or computer. Up to now, two FMS units have been installed in Sardonoharjo, Ngaglik, Sleman and Faculty of Agricultural Technology, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta as deployment test. In this article, installation and utilization of Field Monitoring System (FMS) on agricultural production will be explained. As the result, long-term environmental monitoring data (air temperature, air humidity and solar radiation) have been used as farmer decision support to prevent crops damages caused by extreme weather during cultivation. In the future works, comprehensive utilization of environmental information, local weather forecast, and control will be studied.
Keyword: precision agriculture, precision farming, tropical agriculture, information technology in agriculture, environmental monitoring
Submitted to International Conference on International Conference on Sustainable Innovation (ICoSI) Indonesia