SMART FARMING TECHNOLOGY

Smart Farming Technology 

Introduction

Traditionally farming as a practice has been in the past and will continue in the future to be a manual and labor-intensive industry. With technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Big data & Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) touching almost all the listed industry sectors know. How can it no be the case for Agriculture and modern Internet and Communication Technology (ICT) to interact?

A small initiative in the 1990’s by John Deere Co. of using a GPS system in tractors linked to the satellite for automated steering the crop map reducing errors and hence increasing crop yield by reduction in wastage seeds, optimum utilization of fertilizers & manures, fuel and time made the way for a full-fledged industry.

According to a report published by Food and Agriculture Organization (FOA) of the United Nations, there are going to be 8.5 billion human beings on planet earth by 2030 and 9.6 billion inhabitants on earth by the year 2050. It is estimated that to feed this population, food production must increase by 70% considering limited agriculture land, scarcity of fresh water, and ever-changing climate conditions.

To address this challenge, efforts are in place to improve the quality and quantity of agriculture products by making them ‘Intelligent’ and ‘connected’ through “smart farming” also referred to as “precision farming”. Precision agriculture as an industry is poised to grow to 43.4 billion USD by end of 2025.

What Exactly is Smart Farming?

Smart farming can be referred to as the 4.0 green revolution in the field of agriculture combining agriculture methodologies with technology – Sensors & Actuators, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Internet of Things (IoT), Robotics and Drones to achieve desired efficiencies of production with managed cost.

According to a survey, 80% of farmers in US and 24% farmers in UK have already started using Smart Farming Tool (SFT). These numbers are cognizant of the fact that SFTs are adding value to the farming ecosystem. As far as scale of operations is considered, Smart farming tools and techniques can be applied to large scale distributed conventional farming and can be applied to focused small farming set of organic farms.

Technology behind Smart Farming:
The structure of IoT is based on three layers

1.  The perception layer (sensing)
2.  The network layer (data transfer)
3.  The application layer (data storage and manipulation)

Layer 1: The perception layer

At the perception layer, we meet technologies such as WSN, RFID and, recently, Near Field communications (NFC). There is some overlap between WSN and RFID technologies, since semi-passive and active RFID tags can also be regarded as wireless nodes with lower computational and storage capacity. Typically, a wireless sensor node consists of a processing module, usually a low-power microcontroller unit (MCU), one or more sensor modules (embedded or external analogue or digital sensing devices) and an RF module, supporting a low-power wireless technology.

WSNs are often met in several works related to monitoring and climate control of storage and logistics facilities. RFID tags contain data in the form of the Electronic Product Code (EPC), and the RFID Readers are triggering, reading and manipulating many tags. Offering object identification, tracking and data storage on active or passive (without the need for embedded power supply) tags, RFID and NFC technologies play an important role in the agricultural domain. Typical user scenarios include products or livestock monitoring, supply chain and quality control tracking and lifecycle assessment of agriculture products.

 Layer 2: The network layer

At the second layer of IoT, wireless sensor nodes interacting with physical objects and/or their environment, communicate with their neighboring nodes or a gateway, building networks through which the data are usually forwarded towards a remote infrastructure for storage, further analysis, processing and dissemination of the valuable knowledge that can be extracted.

Communication protocols built over wireless standards, facilitate the device networking and bridge the gap between the internet-enabled gateways and the end-nodes. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), LoRa/LoRaWAN, DASH7 and low-power WiFi have also appeared in several deployments recently.              

Layer 3: The application layer

The application layer is the third layer of the IoT. It is of high importance and, in many ways, it is this that facilitates the realization of the IoT. The application layer faces several issues which must be resolved, such as the identification of the devices as unique entities.

Finally, for the sensed data to have a real value for the end-user or another system (in case of M2M scenarios) they must be stored, analyzed, synthesized and presented in an understandable and intuitive manner. Big Data is one side effect of the continuous data flow coming from billions of geo-distributed devices and has three dimensions, namely volume, variety and velocity.

WSAN (Wireless Sensor-Actor Network) paradigm, i.e. distributed smart devices sensing and transferring data to a sink and/or driving one or more actuators, moves one step further towards interoperability of devices and objects. Other aspects of IoT include technologies that support the intercommunication among devices and/or end-users, as well as the platforms, the software, the hardware abstractions and the programming tools, over which developers and providers can build new applications and services.

The Benefits of Smart Farming: How IoT Is Shaping Agriculture
There are five ways IoT can improve agriculture:

1.Data, tons of data, collected by smart agriculture sensors

 weather conditions, soil quality, crop’s growth progress or cattle health. This data can be used to track the state of your business in general, as well as staff performance, equipment efficiency, etc.

2.Better control over the internal processes and, as a result, lower production risks.
The ability to foresee the output of your production allows you to plan for better product distribution. If you know exactly how much crops you are going to harvest, you can make sure your product won’t lie around unsold.

3.Cost management and waste reduction to the increased control over production.
Being able to see any anomalies in the crop growth or livestock health, you will be able to mitigate the risks of losing your yield.

4.Increased business efficiency through process automation.
By using smart devices, you can automate multiple processes across your production cycle, e.g. irrigation, fertilizing, or pest control.

5.Enhanced product quality and volumes.
Achieve better control over the production process and maintain higher standards of crop quality and growth capacity through automation.

IoT Use in Agriculture 

There are many types of IoT sensors and IoT applications that can be used in agriculture:

Monitoring of Climate Conditions

Probably the most popular smart agriculture gadgets are weather stations, combining various smart farming sensors. Located across the field, they collect various data from the environment and send it to the cloud. The provided measurements can be used to map the climate conditions, choose the appropriate crops, and take the required measures to improve their capacity (i.e. precision farming).

Some examples of such agriculture IoT devices are allMETEO, Smart Elements, and Pycno.

Greenhouse Automation

In addition to sourcing environmental data, weather stations can automatically adjust the conditions to match the given parameters. Specifically, greenhouse automation systems use a similar principle.

For instance, Farmapp and Growlink are also IoT agriculture products offering such capabilities among others.

GreenIQ is also an interesting product that uses smart agriculture sensors. It is a smart sprinklers controller that allows you to manage your irrigation and lighting systems remotely.

Crop Management

One more type of IoT product in agriculture and another element of precision farming is crop management devices. Just like weather stations, they should be placed in the field to collect data specific to crop farming; from temperature and precipitation to leaf water potential and overall crop health, these can all be used to readily collect data and information for improved farming practices.

Thus, you can monitor your crop growth and any anomalies to effectively prevent diseases or infestations that could harm your yield. Arable and Semios can serve as good representations of how this use case can be applied in real life.

Cattle Monitoring and Management

Just like crop monitoring, there are IoT agriculture sensors that can be attached to the animals on a farm to monitor their health and log performance. This works similarly to IoT devices for pet care.

For example, SCR by Allflex and Cowlar use smart agriculture sensors (collar tags) to deliver temperature, health, activity, and nutrition insights on each individual cow, as well as collective information about the herd.

End-to-End Farm Management System

A more complex approach to IoT products in agriculture can be represented by the so-called farm productivity management systems. They usually include a number of agriculture IoT devices and sensors, installed on the premises as well as a powerful dashboard with analytical capabilities and in-built accounting/reporting features.

This offers remote farm monitoring capabilities and allows you to streamline most of the business operations. Similar solutions are represented by FarmLogs and Cropio.

In addition to the listed IoT agriculture use cases, some prominent opportunities include vehicle tracking (or even automation), storage management, logistics, etc.

Conclusion:

After knowing about some IoT applications in agriculture, we can say that it is definitely revolutionize the agriculture industry in a few years. IoT has been applied in several areas of agriculture. A lot of research is underway to ensure more IoT devices are used to make the managing of farms easier and increase productivity. IoT is allowing farmers to easily obtain data that is useful in many ways such as decision making. With the increasing demand for food due to the rapid population increase, we expect more IoT applications in the next few years.