With the world’s population growing at an exponential rate, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the world would need to produce 70% additional food by 2050, dwindling farming land, and degradation of limited natural resources, the need to increase farm production has become important. The scarcity of natural resources like freshwater resources and arable land, along with declining yield trends in key staple commodities, has exacerbated the problem. Another source of concern in the farming business is the changing composition of the agricultural labor. Furthermore, agricultural labor has reduced in the majority of countries. As the agricultural workforce has declined, the adoption of internet network infrastructure in farming techniques has increased in order to eliminate the demand for physical labor.
IoT solutions are aimed at assisting farmers in closing the supply-demand gap by guaranteeing high yields, revenue, and environmental preservation.
With contemporary agricultural trends relying on agriculture, the Iot technology has offered enormous benefits such as effective water usage, input optimization, and many more. What made a difference were the enormous benefits, which have recently changed agriculture.
Smart Farming based on IoT improves the overall agriculture system by monitoring the land in real-time. The IoT in Agriculture, with the use of sensors and interconnection, has not only saved farmers’ time but also decreased the waste of resources like water and electricity. It monitors many elements like humidity, temperature, soil, and so on and provides a crystal clear genuine monitoring.
By implementation of IoT in agriculture can bring opportunities and various critical measurement can be monitored as explained further: –
Climate Conditions: -
Climate is extremely important in agriculture. Inadequate climate knowledge also has a negative impact on crop production quantity and quality.
However, IoT technologies allow you to monitor the weather in real time. Sensors are installed both within and outside of agricultural areas. They collect data from the environment, which is then utilized to select crops that can grow and thrive in the specific climatic circumstances. The entire IoT ecosystem consists of sensors capable of reliably detecting real-time meteorological variables such as humidity, rainfall, temperature, and others. There are numerous sensors designed to detect all of these criteria and configure them to meet your smart farming needs. These sensors are used to monitor the crop’s condition as well as the surrounding weather. If any unusual meteorological conditions are discovered, a warning is issued. The requirement for personal presence during disruptive meteorological circumstances is minimized, which boosts production and allows farmers to gain more agricultural benefits.
Precision Farming: -
Precision agriculture/farming is one of most well-known IoT applications in agriculture.
It implements sustainable farming technologies such as animal tracking, vehicle tracking, field survey, and inventory control to enhance the precision & control over farming processes.. Precision farming’s purpose is to analyze data collected by sensors and respond accordingly. Precision farming enables farmers to produce data using sensors and analyze that data in order to make educated and timely decisions. Precision farming techniques such as irrigation management, livestock management, vehicle tracking, and many more play an important role in enhancing efficiency and effectiveness. Precision farming allows you to analyze soil characteristics and other associated data to boost operational efficiency. Not only that, but you can also identify the real-time operating characteristics of the connected devices in order to identify water and nutrient levels.
Smart Greenhouse:
IoT has permitted weather data to autonomously modify climate conditions based on a specific set of instructions, making our greenhouses smart.
The usage of Internet of things in greenhouses has reduced the need for human interaction, making the entire process more cost-effective while also enhancing accuracy. For example, employing solar-powered IoT sensors to construct sophisticated and low-cost greenhouses. These sensors capture and send real-time data that aids in the exact monitoring of the greenhouse status. Water use and greenhouse gas emissions can be tracked using sensors and alerted via email or SMS. IoT is used to do automatic and smart irrigation. These sensors aid in providing data on pressure, humidity, temperature, and light levels.
Data Analytics:
The traditional database system lacks sufficient capacity for the data generated by IoT devices.
The smart agriculture system relies heavily on cloud-based information storage and an end-to-end IoT platform. These systems are expected to play a vital role in enabling better activities to be carried out. Sensors are the major source of large-scale data collection in the IoT world. Using analytics technologies, the data is examined and turned into relevant information. The assessment of weather conditions, livestock circumstances, and agricultural conditions is aided by data analytics. The data acquired is used to leverage technological breakthroughs, resulting in better decisions. You can learn about the real-time status of crops by capturing data from sensors using IoT devices. Using predictive analytics, you can gain insight to make better harvesting decisions. Farmers can use trend analysis to predict future weather patterns and crop harvests. To increase crop quantity & quality, IoT analytical tools provide great contribution by assisting farmers in maintaining crop quality and soil fertility.
Agricultural Drones:
Technological improvements have nearly completely altered agricultural operations, with the adoption of agricultural drones being the most recent disruption.
Drones are used for crop health screening, crop management, seeding, crop spraying, and field analysis. Drone technology has given the agriculture industry a boost and makeover with appropriate strategic planning based on real-time data. Drones equipped with thermal or hyperspectral sensors identify areas which require irrigation adjustments. Sensors show crop health and estimate the vegetation index once the crops begin to grow. Smart drones eventually minimized the environmental impact. The end effect has been a tremendous reduction and much reduced chemical impacting the groundwater.
Remote Sensing:
IoT-based analytical tools require data to execute the task thus, sensors, such as weather stations, are put near farms to collect data, which is then communicated to analytical tools for examination.
Generally remote sensing through IoT plays a major role in Crop monitoring & Soil quality assessment. For crop monitoring, sensors placed along the farms monitor changes in light, humidity, temperature, shape, and size of the crops. Any abnormality detected by the sensing devices is investigated and reported to the farmer. As a result, remote sensing can aid in disease prevention and crop growth monitoring. And for Soil health study aids in assessing the nutrient value and drier parts of farms, as well as soil drainage capacity and acidity, allowing for adjustments in the amount of water required for irrigation and the most effective type of cultivation.
Conclusion: -
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that allows you to connect your devices to the internet Agriculture has helped to bring cutting-edge technological solutions to time-tested experience. As a result, the margin among production, quality, and quantity yield has narrowed. Data Ingestion ensures quick action and minimal crop damage by acquiring and importing input from multiple sensors for real-time usage or storage in a database. Produce is processed faster and delivered to supermarkets in less time thanks to seamless end-to-end intelligent operations and better business process execution.
