Precision Agriculture and Smart Farming Using IoT
The world population is continuously growing and with that food demands. It places pressure on the agriculture industry to multiply the food production, improve efficiency and cut crop yield boosting costs. In addition to that, climate change, declining water resources, dwindling fossil fuels are increasing challenges in front of farmers. Modern world technologies are introduced in the agriculture sector with the hope to grow sufficient yield while reducing the impact on the ecosystem. The Internet of Things (IoT) can help farmers through farm management concepts such as precision agriculture and smart farming to achieve efficiency, productivity and affordability.
Precision agriculture brings accuracy in decisions based on sensors, data, and network communication farming systems. It provides farmers management strategies by gathering, processing, and analysing spatial, temporal, and individual data. This data is then combined with other information to support decisions as per the estimated variability for resource use productivity, quality, profitability, and efficiency. Site-specific crop management in precision agriculture observes, measures and responds to inter and intra-field variability in crops. Farmers can enhance the precision in agricultural operations and processes with accurate field data. It results in sustainable growth and reduced cost of farming practices.
One of the most popular emerging farm management concepts is smart farming. It uses technology to make smart decisions to optimise resource usage and manage yield growth. Smart farming using IoT combines Information Technology (IT) with other farming elements like agricultural drones, control systems, autonomous vehicles, sensors, variable speed technology, robotics, automated hardware and so on. The field information linked with IoT-enabled equipment allows automatic adjustment of field parameters such as temperature, water level and so forth. IoT-equipped drones in large farmlands help to receive real-time crops information by sending live pictures of the farmland.
Through precision agriculture and smart farming using IoT can help in developing sustainable and efficient agricultural practices, it is challenging to develop IoT platforms. Farm solutions need a unified solution to integrate and synchronise with different types of devices. As farming fields are not yet effectively connected to the internet, enabling IoT platforms is a big challenge in rural areas. Additionally, consumers are not aware or educated of the IoT platforms that limit the implementation of smart farming using IoT. Various service providers are involved in the IoT farm solutions that increase the difficulty in maintaining interoperability among several IoT systems. Lastly, there needs a scalable solution to integrating thousands of IoT systems and devices in large farms.
