The birth of agriculture and house training of plants and animals was developed 10,000 years ago, in the change of time the importance of agriculture cannot be over emphasized. Comprehensive farming made food available to much greater population as it reduced the hunting and gathering. Man learned techniques and new way for better farming in which weather forecasting plays key role. In order to predict the climatic changes instruments were needed to measure the soil moisture, temperature and humidity. The first invention of soil moisture sensor is Tensiometer and pressure membrane is used to measure the moisture in the soil in the year 1940, and thermometer to measure temperature in 1592 (N.Krishna Chaitanya, G.Anand Kumar, P.Aruna Kumari, 2013).

Nigeria being an agricultural country needs some innovation in the field of agriculture. This can be achieved through modern technologies which assist computing, communication and control within devices, WSN is best suit for this purpose. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) technologies have become a backbone for modern precision agriculture monitoring (Miskam, Muhamad Azman, Azwan bin Nasirudin and Inzarulfaisham Abd., 2009). WSN in agriculture helps in distributed data collection, environmental monitoring, precise irrigation and fertilizer supply to produce bountiful crop production while reducing cost and assisting farmers in real time data gathering.

The possible economic benefits for accurate monitoring in agriculture are endless. Selective farming and harvesting times protects the crops from temperature and humidity rather than with more climatic monitoring, but to yield a better throughput and insure the protection of the crops agricultural monitoring leads the way.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Agricultural monitoring is of great importance to farmers, whereby information is made available to them before commencement of a planting season. This practice and new technology enhance production and thus eliminates the traditional extension services by extension workers. Thus the need for wireless monitoring brings us to this topic.

1.3 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

The aim of this project is to design a wireless sensor network of ZigBee technology to monitor agricultural environment. This system should be able to perform the following functions: