IoT in Agriculture

With the exponential growth of world population, according to the UN Food

and Agriculture Organization, the world will need to produce 70% more food

in 2050, shrinking agricultural lands, and depletion of finite natural

resources, the need to enhance farm yield has become critical. Limited

availability of natural resources such as fresh water and arable land along

with slowing yield trends in several staple crops, have further aggravated the

problem. Another impeding concern over the farming industry is the shifting

structure of agricultural workforce. Moreover, agricultural labor in most of

the countries has declined. As a result of the declining agricultural workforce,

adoption of internet connectivity solutions in farming practices has been

triggered, to reduce the need for manual labor.

IoT solutions are focused on helping farmers close the supply demand

gap, by ensuring high yields, profitability, and protection of the environment.

The approach of using IoT technology to ensure optimum application of

resources to achieve high crop yields and reduce operational costs is called

precision agriculture. IoT in agriculture technologies comprise specialized

equipment, wireless connectivity, software and IT services.

BI Intelligence survey expects that the adoption of IoT devices in the

agriculture industry will reach 75 million in 2020, growing 20% annually. At

the same time, the global smart agriculture market size is expected to triple

by 2025, reaching $15.3 billion (compared to being slightly over $5 billion

back in 2016).

Smart farming based on IoT technologies enables growers and farmers to

reduce waste and enhance productivity ranging from the quantity of fertilizer

utilized to the number of journeys the farm vehicles have made, and enabling

efficient utilization of resources such as water, electricity, etc. IoT smart

farming solutions is a system that is built for monitoring the crop field with

the help of sensors (light, humidity, temperature, soil moisture, crop health,

etc.) and automating the irrigation system. The farmers can monitor the field

conditions from anywhere. They can also select between manual and

automated options for taking necessary actions based on this data. For

example, if the soil moisture level decreases, the farmer can deploy sensors to

start the irrigation. Smart farming is highly efficient when compared with the

conventional approach. IoT have the potential to transform agriculture in

many aspects and these are the main ones.

Data collected by smart agriculture sensors, in this approach of farm

management, a key component are sensors, control systems, robotics,

autonomous vehicles, automated hardware, variable rate technology, motion

detectors, button camera, and wearable devices. This data can be used to

track the state of the business in general as well as staff performance,

equipment efficiency. The ability to foresee the output of production allows to

plan for better product distribution.

Agricultural Drones Ground-based and aerial-based drones are being

used in agriculture in order to enhance various agricultural practices: crop

health assessment, irrigation, crop monitoring, crop spraying, planting, and

soil and field analysis.