Automated vs. Semi-Automated Hydroponics: Quantifying Automation Effects on Plant Growth

Abstract

The issue of hydroponic farming is the ongoing requirement to maintain and control the artificial growing environment to enable optimal plant growth. The quality of the plants growing on the farm can be significantly impacted by changes in the climate, natural light, and fertilizer solution at any time during the plant's growth cycle. According to studies, every 3°C increase in ambient temperature from the optimal range reduces crop productivity by 10 to 40%. Therefore, by automatically supplying ideal growth conditions throughout the growing cycle, IoT-based automation is crucial to achieving optimal plant growth. In this work, lettuce is grown simultaneously in two distinct hydroponic Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) systems, one of which is fully automated and the other semi-automated. In terms of plant growth metrics, such as plant elevation, maximum plant length, maximum plant breadth, and weight of both fresh and dry-farmed lettuce, this paper compared a fully automated farm and a semi-automated NFT farm for growing lettuce. The outcomes demonstrate that the ariel weight of fresh and dry lettuce and root weight of fresh and dry lettuce had average improvements of 10.4 gm, 0.7 gm, 0.11 gm, 0.7 gm, and 3, respectively in the fully automated setup. Findings also demonstrated that IoT-based automation enhances the growth of lettuce plants on farms when comparing a completely automatic hydroponic farm to a semi-automatic hydroponic farm, in terms of plant height, width, and total leaf count.