Decreasing Water Usage for Vietnamese Small Farmers: Insights into the Introduction of Smart Agriculture

The EPICS program, an acronym for Engineering Projects in Community Service, provides students an opportunity to create engineering solutions to “real world” problems. This honors thesis project is a collaboration with the EPICS program, the Vietnam Smart Agriculture EPICS team, and the Da Nang University of Technology (DUT) in Da Nang, Vietnam. The goal of the Vietnam Smart Agriculture EPICS team is to design an accessible system to reduce water consumption for Vietnamese small farmers through the use of smart agriculture technology. In January of 2023, my EPICS team and I were able to travel and interview five farmers in the Tra Que Farm to complete a needs assessment. The focus of this thesis project is to provide background research and to complete a feasibility study to aid the Vietnam Smart Agriculture EPICS team in developing a smart agriculture device to aid small farmers with overwatering. The thesis includes a literature review investigating solutions for evaluating the water needs of crops, delves into insights gathered from interviews with Vietnamese small farmers, and data collected from their farms.