The Need - Organic Compost
Organic compost is a nutrient-dense, cost-efficient natural fertiliser which supports soil regeneration and the increase of soil organic matter. In Greece and many other countries in the region, due to cost limitations and/or lack of digital skills, the manufacturing of compost, which is taking place in open space piles, is mainly manual. This includes both the monitoring of the compost conditions, which is limited to manual daily checks of the pile’s temperature, but also the decision making and management process, including compost irrigation and stirring activities.
The Solution - DigiCompost
DigiCompost is a solution digitises the overall production process, offering extensive supervision, control and optimisation over it along with prediction capabilities on the compost’s nutrients and time of completion. Selected (I4MS) technologies are integrated into DigiCompost solution: Sensors monitoring the compost pile’s conditions (Temperature, Moisture, pH, O2), IoT technologies for data collection and persistence (wrapped around LoRaWAN), Data analytics (including Machine Learning and AI that will allow to identify correlations among monitored parameters and compost process/outcomes) and Smart Modeling that supports the decision making for automated actuation (compost sprinkler activation when temperature and humidity are above/below a threshold) or dynamic notifications for actions (e.g. usage of compost turner to aerate the compost).
DigiCompost focuses on the concurrent management of multiple piles of large volumes of heterogeneous organic raw materials that are composted in open spaces. At the same time relevant restrictions that are being considered are to keep the environmental footprint, the financial investment cost and overall nuisance level to minimum. In order to monitor critical metrics in the field, i.e. parameters related to compost conditions, a technical infrastructure which incorporates and combines sensor devices for recording metrics, RF network for data transmission and a light IT infrastructure for data persistent storage and visualisation, is being utilised.