Abstract: Known as "9 out of 10 years are drought years", Jilin Province is one of the drought-prone provinces in central and western of China. In the past, drought monitoring has been carried out by manual monitoring, which has a severe impact on the progress of drought relief work. The construction and operation of the drought emergency monitoring system in the Midwest of Jilin have laid a solid foundation for the realization of soil moisture monitoring automation. In this paper, the key technology of the project construction and operation are summarised, 11 new ideas for soil moisture monitoring automation are proposed. The drought emergency monitoring system will play an important role at promoting national soil moisture automation monitoring.