By Zablon Oyugi
Normally, stealing or burgle has always been heard to occur in houses at residential areas but recently this crime also takes place at the farm.
As we know, most farms are located in open areas with poor fencing away from homesteads and sometimes farmers also leave their farming equipment and chemical substances at the farm.
Therefore, such farms have become targeted places by thieves instead of houses because there are large tendency and opportunity not to be seen by people when the farmer is not around.
While thieves can make illegal profits from crops, livestock and other valuable items stolen from the farms, intrusion by animals can also lead to loss of significant amount of produce further affecting farmers’ income and efforts towards attaining food security and zero hunger by 2030 as specified under Goal 2 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
It follows therefore that by adopting smart farm access control and security systems can not only help farm owners keep thieves away and prevent destruction by animals but also boost farm production by preventing unauthorized access, into some sensitive farm production areas, by persons or animals which may spread diseases.
According to a study by some four Nigerian computer scientists on Design and Implementation of Farm Monitoring and Security System published in 2018 by International Journal of Computer Applications, many large farm lands and plantations in Africa can be expensive and stressful to fence.
Farmers therefore resort to trivial and very ineffective sticks and ropes to build fences which cannot prevent intrusion.
However, in the new technological era, the farm owners can adopt, for instance, the wireless sensor networks (WSN) technology that can be used in this effect to get real time information of the farm and know when an intrusion occurs, the nature or type of intrusion with the necessary action(s) to follow.
Under the “smart farming” system that combines traditional agricultural methodologies with actuators, sensors, Internet of Things (IoT), Information and communication technology (ICT), artificial intelligence (AI) and drones, farmers can access precise, accurate information that help in optimizing farming tasks.
“Smart farm security system is an advanced technology concept farm that focused on several smart divisions which are electric fencing system, wireless camera and Global System Multimedia (GSM) alarm motion detector,” states the scientist in their study.
In addition, it is included with the lighting system on the electrical fence which only activates whenever it detects the absence of a human.
In this, the system helps farmers to protect their crops, livestock and equipment from getting damaged by animals and theft.
Designing a farm using WSN
According to the Nigerian computer scientists, to design a farm monitoring system based on WSN, some of the components required are processor board, intrusion detection sensors, cameras, and buzzer alarms among others in which wireless intrusion detector is used as a sensor.
How it works
“When human, animals or birds come in contact with the visualization of the cameras; the circuit will be grounded and will get an initial input signal that indicates presence of human, animals or birds on the farm land,” says their study in part.
The system will then be activated and an alarm (one of the system feature) will be raised to scare the intruders to leave the farm premises. However, when the intruder stays, let’s say, for more than 30 seconds on the farm land, the GSM module is used for sending SMS to the farm owner indicating the nature of intrusion.
“This alerts the farmer that some human (mostly) or animals or birds are on the farm. Then the metallic sensor feature of the system informs the farm owner if a human being who intrudes the farm is armed with metallic objects such as knife, cutlass, and gun among other.”
Web-based monitoring systems
There are also other web-based monitoring systems such as WAGRIT which have a structure that separates data acquisition devices and the web server.
However, the Farm Security Monitoring System has a structure that integrates the WSN sensors, CCTVs, database server, web server, among others to collect information on the farm parameters and image information into a device for collecting various pieces of information on the environment, and provides real-time monitoring and various application services based on the information, according to the study.
Access Control
In their study titled “Effective and Efficient Access Control in Smart Farms,” conducted at the Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia, Athens, researchers Ghadeer Yassin and Lakshmish Ramaswamy explain that access control involves reviewing each request to the system’s data and resources and determining whether it should be allowed or denied.
In fact, it confirms users by checking their login credentials and then give them access based on their valid credentials.
They say that various access control policies are available for smart systems, such as the “RBAC” model, which organizes access to resources based on hierarchical rights and permissions assigned to different roles.
On the other hand, “ABAC” model assesses requests based on the requester’s attributes, the required action, and the context, moving away from role-based lists to consider attributes and contextual factors.
Other models like the “MAC” model restrict access to system resources depending on their sensitivity and whether the user is authorized to access resources with that level of sensitivity. “TBAC” allows restrictions on resource access based on specific times or days and “LBAC” which limits resource access based on the user’s location, ensuring access only when they are physically present in a predefined location.
Factors to consider when designing farm security monitoring system
Well Maintained Environment
At the time of designing, it is advisable to make structural function for getting security a well maintained environment for better output of result. The camera should be well captured with sufficient light, and buzzer should be well sound maintained.
Efficiency
The efficiency will depend upon the proper connection as well as order nomination of all parts of device that can give a good result.
Eco-Friendly
The device working process should be very much eco-friendly, in that, there should be no collision in between components and the safety ensured for users.
