CHALLANGES WITH SMART FARMING

Challanges With Smart Farming

From a technical perspective

ICT technologies and IoT are rapidly changing smart farming and the overall food industry. They have the potential to bring in the future, through large scale deployments, huge benefits in the form of a more sustainable agriculture, ensuring food security with a lower environmental impact and guaranteed healthy food production.

However, reaping the full benefits will require overcoming certain IoT related challenges and barriers, both from technical and non-technical perspective. At the same time, these difficulties bring new opportunities for technological development and value creation considering different type of stakeholders.

1.Interoperability and Standardization

Proprietary architectures, platforms and standards represent a barrier for the wide adoption of IoT in the agri-food sector due to the risks associated to vendor lock-in, incompatibility with other systems, etc. One of the challenges in the agri-food sector is to properly capture its particularities in the definition of new global, open standards and the alignment with existing standardization initiatives from different stakeholders, stemming either from ICT or from agri-food that need to be continuously aligned. In farming and food applications, one must consider farm management and traceability systems, agricultural machinery information exchange (including fleet management), and in general the specific data lifecycle (generation, collection, aggregation, visualization).

2.Enabling IoT devices

Many of the benefits promised by IoT, including continuous and fine-monitoring of parameters and variables, will only come through technological breakthroughs such as the increase of computational power enabling edge computing/analytics, together with the drastic decrease of energy consumption in sensors and actuators to become (almost) energy-autonomous devices. The large-scale scope of farming applications also claims for more intelligence in the devices deployed in the field, including self-configuration and self-management capabilities. In traceability and food safety scenarios there is a clear challenge in developing new and cost-effective sensors communication technologies, as for instance current biosensors, as well RFID and NFC tags are not always viable (compared to the cost of food product), in particular when targeting fine granularity, possibly at the individual product level. Further attention needs to be dedicated to the device characteristics, since food is considered as a commodity with low profit margin and short lifetimes. Compared to tangible products from other sectors (e.g. clothing, furniture, multimedia), direct pairing of IoT with fresh produce is rather impossible often-requiring additional packaging. IoT potentials are not necessarily directly transferrable to food and farm, asking for additional efforts and costs, assuring that enabling IoT devices will neither be harmful to environment, nor the consumers.

3.Enabling Network, Cloud and Communications

Connectivity is essential for making the best out of the IoT. However, IoT intensive precision farming applications take place at food production (farms, aquaculture facility) which are in rural areas where broadband coverage is still far low. At the same time, agri-food is asking for IoT devices with a low power communication profile, even if this reduces bandwidth and communication frequency.

4.Information Services

Generation and collection of data is just the beginning in IoT applications. Extracting value from the data, in the form of meaningful and actionable information for the users, is the final goal. In this regard, although there are already good application examples, information services in the agri-food domain are still in an incipient stage. Short-term developments are mostly aimed at decision support systems, based usually on rules engines. More advanced data planning based on the demand (thus enabling demand-driven farming), are still a challenge in most agri-food applications. At this, object data has to be combined with a wealth of (3 party) archives such as historical and forecasted meteorological data, satellite data, soil, water and air-analyses, logistic systems, and data on prices, logistics, retail, food service, and consumers, diets, etc. In this context. the usability of the information services is also of high interest: farm management systems should be easily adaptable to holdings of different sizes, and with a low learning curve for the user, while facilitating interoperability for horizontal and vertical collaboration of business partners in the agri-food chain.

5.Data Security

Farming and food chain are becoming more and more data-driven, so data here becomes a precious asset. Indeed, the data captured by farming machinery potentially conveys a large amount of information, which is critical to the farmers, such as soil fertility and crop yield, so farmers must have strong guarantees on the protection of their data, in particular in cases where such data is stored (and possibly processed) in cloud-based services. Therefore, many users are currently concerned with data ownership, privacy and security, which too often results in a lack of confidence and a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude. On the other hand, aggregation of data from different farms has the potential for generating huge added value. However, farmers must understand clearly the benefits they will get from such aggregation, as well as having the guarantee that their individual data is properly protected. In other words, Digital Rights Management solutions must be brought to the farming domain, for scenarios of data aggregation and data sharing. This will also facilitate a promotion of data initiatives for agri-food purposes as well as enabling an inter-sectorial collaboration. From a technical security perspective, there are additional challenges to be considered in the domain of trusted data: the integrity and authenticity of the data generated and stored must be guaranteed. In traceability/safety applications, this is relevant to the origin of the product as well as the processing in farming it is for in insurance-related issues. Trustworthiness requirements demand challenging solutions, such as low-cost authentication mechanisms for devices/machines. At the consumer side, security issues must do more with personal data, thus bringing privacy at stake. For instance, IoT applications related to personalized nutrition imply privacy challenges because of personal and behavioral data captured from wearables, smartphones, etc.

6.IoT Platforms

There are numerous IoT platforms, stemming from open source initiatives as well as representing commercial IOT platforms. Besides the challenges with respect to governance, connectivity, fragmentation, interoperability, and stakeholders, it is emphasized that the need for decision support at the application level to capitalize on the IOT, requires a loosely coupled, modular software environment based on APIs to enable endpoint data collection and interaction. This is specifically true for small and medium sized companies representing the majority in farming as well as parts in the food chain. IoT empowered application might be enough to help solving a very particular problem. Applications could help process and interpret data and make suggestions

 or give advice. For example: Sensors in the field are measuring the conditions of the soil and consolidate this data in an app that is also predicting rain. Therefore, the farmer is advised against spraying his field that day.

From a non-technical perspective

It is worth to mention other non-technical issues, which are crucial towards development of IoT agriculture application:

Business model

Data driven value chainsopens the door for new disruptive business models in traditional sectors such as farming and food industries. However, the sustainability of IoT-based businesses, both for the supply side (providers of IoT technology) and demand (agri-food users) stakeholders must be investigated, specifically in the context of large-scale deployments. From an end user perspective, the quantifiable benefit and profitability must compensate for the cost of acquiring, operating and maintaining the IoT solutions. Upfront cost of acquiring the IoT platforms and services are currently a real barrier preventing wider adoption, by small-sized farms.

Social aspect

IoT based solutions for the agri-food sector must prove their value massively to the users. IoT technologies enable to capture large amount of data nearly in real time. However, data must be beneficial to and useable for farmers and all the stakeholders across the food chain. The benefits of the technology must be brought to real farming scenarios; thus, dissemination and awareness are essential. An added difficulty in this regard is the heterogeneity of the agri-food value chain. In addition, to get the full benefits of IoT in farming applications it is essential that the users have certain digital skills.

Policy and regulations

Policies play an important role in the widespread deployment of IoT-based innovations in farming and food chains. Such as:

3.1 Formulating clear security/privacy policies for protecting the farmer’s data from unauthorized disclosure and for controlled and secure access to the authorized third parties.

3.2 Supporting faster roll out of broadband internet access in rural areas.

3.3 Enhancing digital skills and inclusions.

 Stakeholder involvement

We observe the changing roles of old and new software suppliers in relation to IoT, big data and agri-food. The stakeholder network exhibits a high degree of dynamics with new players taking over the roles played by other players and the incumbents assuming new roles in relation to the agriculture data, information and knowledge. IoT also entails organizational issues of farming and the supply chain. Further technological development may likely result in two supply chain scenarios from a stakeholder perspective. One with further integration of the linear supply chain in which farmers become franchiser. Another scenario in which farmers are empowered by IoT and open collaboration. The latter would enable also small stakeholder to easily switch between suppliers, share data with government and participate in short supply chains rather than integrated long supply chains.