High-Intelligence Irrigation in Greenhouses – A Case Study of Precision Fertilization for Tomatoes
In large-scale greenhouse vegetable cultivation, water and fertilizer management is a crucial factor determining yield, quality, and cost. Traditional manual irrigation and fertilization suffers from problems such as high water and fertilizer consumption, poor uniformity, high labor intensity, and extensive management, making it difficult to meet the production requirements of high-quality tomatoes with continuous fruiting and precise fertilization needs. With the popularization of smart agriculture technology, high-intelligence irrigation systems centered on integrated water and fertilizer machines have been implemented in highly intelligent greenhouses, providing a stable and reliable solution for standardized tomato cultivation. This case study uses a large-scale tomato planting base as an example to introduce the implementation process, operational effects, and promotional value of high-intelligence irrigation and fertilization in agricultural greenhouses.
This base has a contiguous area of approximately 30 acres dedicated to year-round tomato cultivation, divided into 6 independent planting units. In the initial stages of production, manual watering and fertigation of water-soluble fertilizer were used. Each greenhouse required dedicated personnel to regularly check soil moisture, mix fertilizer, and operate valves. This was not only labor-intensive and inefficient, but also frequently resulted in localized water shortages, uneven fertilizer concentrations, and significant differences in plant growth, leading to a high rate of deformed fruit and persistently high water and fertilizer costs. To improve management, the base comprehensively upgraded its irrigation system, introducing a fully intelligent water and fertilizer machine to create a highly intelligent greenhouse management system, achieving integrated operation of irrigation, fertilization, monitoring, and control.
The core equipment of the highly intelligent greenhouse is the fully automatic water and fertilizer machine, equipped with soil moisture sensors, EC/pH monitoring probes, an IoT control module, and a zoned drip irrigation network. After system deployment, the agricultural greenhouse no longer relies on manual judgment of irrigation timing and dosage. Instead, sensors collect real-time data on substrate moisture, nutrient concentration, and root zone environment, uploading this data to a cloud platform for automatic analysis. Based on the different water and fertilizer requirements of tomato seedlings, flowering and fruit setting stages, and fruit expansion and color change stages, precise irrigation strategies are generated. The equipment can automatically complete the entire process of water absorption, fertilizer mixing, filtration, pressure stabilization, and delivery. It supports zoned control, timed circulation, and abnormal alarms, truly achieving unmanned irrigation in agricultural greenhouses.
