From Industry 4.0 To Agriculture 4.0 Current Status, Enabling Technologies, and Research

This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TII.2020.3003910, IEEE
Machine Translated by Google Transactions on Industrial Informatics
From Industry 4.0 to Agriculture 4.0: Current

Status, Enabling Technologies, and Research
Challenges
Ye Liu, Member, IEEE, Xiaoyuan Ma, Student Member, IEEE, Lei Shu, Senior Member, IEEE,
Gerhard Petrus Hancke, Senior Member, IEEE, and Adnan M. Abu-Mahfouz, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—The three previous industrial revolutions profoundly for seedbed preparation, sowing, irrigation, weeding, and harvesting.
transformed agriculture industry from indigenous farming to Mechanized agriculture greatly increased food production and reduced
mechanised farming and recent precision agriculture. Industrial
manual labors.
farming paradigm greatly improves productivity, but a number
of challenges have gradually emerged, which have exacerbated The second industrial revolution took place in the 20th century,
in recent years. Industry 4.0 is expected to reshape the referred to as Industry 2.0. On the one hand, the main energy source
agriculture industry once again and promote the fourth which was steam, was replaced by oil and gas. The new energy sources,
agricultural revolution. In this paper, first, we review the current together with innovations in the transportation industry, greatly contributed
status of indus trial agriculture along with lessons learned from
to the development of the agri-food supply chain, in which agricultural
industrialized agricultural production patterns, industrialized
productschain.
agricultural production processes, and the industrialized agri-food supply could be shipped to long distances. Consequently, new
Furthermore, five emerging technologies, namely, the Internet agricultural markets were created for farmers as previously isolated
of Things, robotics, Artificial Intelligence, big data analytics, and communities were connected together. On the other hand, the introduction
blockchain, toward Agriculture 4.0 are discussed. Specifically, of assembly line-based mass production significantly improved the
we focus on the key applications of these emerging technologies
efficiency and productivity. This mass production model in the
in the agricultural sector and corresponding research challenges.
This paper aims to open up new research opportunities for manufacturing industry was then applied to livestock production, where
readers, particularly industrial practitioners. traditional home-based animal husbandry was replaced by large-scale
intensive animal farming.
Index Terms—Industry 4.0, Agriculture 4.0, Industrial Agri
cultivation, Precision Agriculture.
Subsequently, the advancement of embedded systems, soft ware

I.INTRODUCTION _
engineering, and communication technologies during the era of Industry
A. Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions The 3.0 further improved the automation capability of manufacturing
roadmaps of the agricultural revolution and industrial revolution are equipment. Green renewable energy such as photovoltaic power,
depicted in Fig. 1. Traditional farming practices from ancient times, when hydroelectricity, and wind power was also being explored. These above-
farmers heavily relied on indigenous tools like hoe, sickle, and pitchfork mentioned developments led to the recent agricultural revolution, known
for cultivation, to the end of the 19th century is referred to as Agriculture as Agriculture 3.0, which aimed at exploring information technologies for
1.0 [1]. Such peasant farming required a great deal of manual labor, but precision agriculture [2] through yield monitoring, variable rate
productivity was very low. Taking advantage of the benefits from the first applications, and guidance farming systems.
industrial revolution (Industry 1.0) during the period between 1784 and
around 1870, agricultural production increased at the beginning of the In a nutshell, the three previous industrial revolutions gradually
20th century referred as Agriculture 2.0, when agricultural machinery modified the form of agricultural activities. The traditional labor-intensive
was introduced agriculture has been replaced by industrial agriculture through the
adoption of industrial production patterns, industrial production
processes, and industrial supply chain management in agriculture.
(Corresponding author: Lei Shu.)
Currently, industrialized food production and distribution dominates the
Y. Liu is with the College of Engineering, Nanjing Agricultural University,
Nanjing, 210031, China (e-mail: [email protected]). global agri culture industry because this method is more productive and
X. Ma is with the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese cost-effective.
Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201210, China and the School of
Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China (e-mail: [email protected]).
L. Shu is with the College of Engineering, Nanjing Agricultural University,
Nanjing, 210031, China, and the College of Science, University of Lincoln, B. From Industry 4.0 to Agriculture 4.0
Brayford Pool, LN67TS, UK (e-mail: [email protected]).
GP Hancke is with the Department of Computer Science, City University However, there still exist several issues that need to be addressed in
of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China (email: [email protected]). the current status of industrial agriculture, such as ecological problems,
AM Abu-Mahfouz is with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
lack of digitization, food safety issue, and inefficient agri-food supply
(CSIR) and with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Science, University of Johannesburg, South Africa (e-mail: chain. A more detailed discussion is given in the next section.
[email protected]).
1551-3203(c) 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Macquarie University. Downloaded on June 24,2020 at 06:41:17 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Machine Translated by Google
2
IoT
HAVE big data
automationinformation technology
Industry
electrical energy 4.0
mass production Industry
3.0
Intelligence
water power Industry
steam engine 2.0 Electronics
Agriculture
Industry Electricity 4.0
Agriculture
1.0
3.0
Mechanization
yield variable rate
Agriculture autonomous farming
indigenous toolmanual work 2.0 monitoring guidance application trustworthy food supply
pesticide system ubiquitous agriculture sensing
fertilizer
Farming 1.0 animal power tractor
academic and industrial groups
green revolution formed for precision agriculture Industry 4.0 in Agriculture
1784 1870 1950 1969 1992 2011 2017 2030 2050 Industry 4.0
first mechanical loom first assembly line first programmable concept
logic controller
Fig. 1. The development roadmap of industrial revolutions [3] and agricultural revolutions.
The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is ongoing, Generally speaking, several authors [3], [5]–[10] presented
and is characterized by a fusion of emerging technologies comprehensive literature reviews and in-depth discussions
such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, Big Data, on how emerging technologies could be harnessed to
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and blockchain technology. At transform manufacturing, production, and supply chain
present, industrial production processes and supply chains management in modern industrial field. Interestingly, the
have become more autonomous and intelligent. application of Industry 4.0 technologies in fighting coronavirus
Correspondingly, the integration of Industry 4.0 and agriculture (COVID-19) pandemic was introduced in [11]. Different from
provides the opportunity to transform industrial agriculture the above discussed works, the motivation of this paper is to
into the next generation, namely, Agriculture 4.0 [4]. In this provide discussions on the adoption of Industry 4.0
context, sustainable and intelligent industrial agriculture approaches in the agriculture industry. Over the last three
would be achieved through real-time variable fine-grained years, many high quality surveys on this topic (ie, the
collection, processing, and analyzing of spatio-temporal data application of modern technologies in the agriculture industry)
in all aspects of the agricultural industry, from food production, [12]–[25] have been conducted, in which the roles of emerging
processing, distribution to consumer experience. Such an technologies such as IoT, robotics ( drone included), and AI
industrial agri culture ecosystem with real-time farm in smart agriculture are provided. The agriculture industry
management, a high degree of automation, and data-driven can be roughly divided into agri-food production and agri-food supply chai
intelligent decision making would greatly improve productivity, Different from existing surveys, this paper provides readers
withresources.
agri-food supply chain efficiency, food safety, and the use of natural the current status and lessons learned from industrial
agriculture in terms of industrialized agricultural production
C. Related Surveys and Our Contributions pattern, industrialized agricultural production process, and
A survey of related work was conducted to compare industrialized agri-food supply chain. Moreover, we aim at
existing state-of-the-art (SoA) papers with this study, as well providing readers with key applications and technical
as direct readers to more information. Literature was collected challenges for future research when Industry 4.0 meets agriculture.
across several academic research databases, including the
Web of Science (WoS), IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, and
Google Scholar. Since this study falls in the area of Industry
4.0 and Agriculture 4.0, the following search keywords were The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
used: “Industry 4.0 + Survey/Review”, “Agriculture 4.0 + presents the current status and lessons learned from industrial
Survey/Review”, and “Industry 4.0 + Agriculture 4.0”. To agriculture. Subsequently, Section III discusses enabling
refine the search results, highly cited papers in the field, hot technologies toward Agriculture 4.0 in terms of key
papers in the field, and highly relevant survey reports were applications and research challenges. Finally, concluding
selected, which are summarized in Table I. remarks are high lighted in Section IV.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TII.2020.3003910, IEEE
TABLE I
SUMMARY OF STATE-OF-THE-ART SURVEYS RELATED TO INDUSTRY 4.0 AND AGRICULTURE 4.0
Target Application Field Technology Focused

Reference year
Manufacturing Production Supply Chain IoT Robotics AI Big Data Blockchain Others
Industry 4.0
Read [5] 2017
Qi et al. [6] 2018
Xu et al. [7] 2018
Aceto et al. [3] 2019
Frank et al. [8] 2019
Rault et al. [9] 2020
Oztemel et al. [10] 2020
Javaid et al. [11] 2020
Industry 4.0 in Agriculture (Agriculture 4.0)
Elijah et al. [12] 2018
Brown et al. [13] 2018
´
Kovacs et al. [14] 2018
Belaud et al. [15] 2019
Zabon et al. [16] 2019 Ayaz
et al. [17] 2019
Farooq et al. [18] 2019
Kim et al. [19] 2019
Ruan et al. [20] 2019
Miranda et al. [21] 2019
Zhai et al. [22] 2020
Ferrag et al. [23] 2020
Rubio et al. [24] 2020
Lezoche et al. [25] 2020
This Study 2020
II. UNDERSTANDING TODAY'S INDUSTRIAL 2) Lessons Learned: Monoculture farming has shown its
AGRICULTURE advantage of increasing yields and boosting profits over many
years of practice, but it also resulted in many ecological
This section discusses the production pattern, production
problems [26]. The growing of a single crop on the same
process, and supply chain in industrial agriculture. More
farmland year by year excessively depletes the soil nutrients,
specifically, we focus on its current status and lessons learned.
which meanwhile cannot be supplemented from surroundings
The take-home messages are summarized in Table II.
due to the lack of biological diversity in monoculture farming.
Nutrient depletion and farmland soil erosion aggravate plant
A. Industrialized Agricultural Production Pattern diseases and pests. To protect crop plants, farmers have to use
the chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides, which, in
1) Current Status: Monoculture and intensive animal farming
turn, damage farmlands, pollute water, and become a serious
are the typical characteristics of agricultural production in threat to human health.
modern practices. Monoculture is an industrialized pattern of
food production, where a single type of cereal, vegetable, and Intensive animal farming also has negative impacts [27]
fruit is grown on the same farmland year after year. This on environmental pollution, climate change, public health,
pattern increases productivity during the entire agricultural and even animal welfare. Local farmlands are overwhelmed
cycle, as farmers only need to focus on a single plant species, by a million tons of manure produced by a huge number
and create a uniform plan for seeding, fertilization, irrigation, of animals in a concentrated space. Rather than providing
and harvesting. It is also profitable as a specialized set of farm nutrients for crop growth, the redundant waste pollutes soil
equipment for one specific crop is sufficient without investing and river. Moreover, industrial livestock production is one
in other types of expensive farm machinery. major cause of climate change due to the heavy greenhouse
Intensive animal farming means that thousands of chickens, gas emissions. Disease-causing organisms such as bacteria
pigs, or cattle are raised in indoor facilities at a high density and viruses are more easily generated in animal factories and
to produce food (eg, meat, eggs, and milk) more efficiently spread between the crowded animals, farmworkers, and their
and economics. This pattern helps feed the increasing urban communities. Lastly, the unfair treatment of livestock raises
population with few farmers because it not only increases food the animal ethical issue due to the serious harmful physical
production but also promotes the fall of food prices. and physiological effects on livestock.
Transactions on Industrial Informatics
TABLE II
THE TAKE-HOME MESSAGES OF CURRENT STATUS AND LESSONS LEARNED ABOUT INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE
Agricultural Production Pattern Agricultural Production Process Agrifood Supply Chain

Current Status • Monoculture • Mechanization • Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C)
• Intensive Animal Farming • Computerization • Online to Offline (O2O)

• Customer to Customer (C2C)
Lessons Learned • Ecological Problems ÿ soil • Lack of Digitization • Food Safety Issue
degradation ÿ lost ÿ pre-digital machinery ÿ ÿ food contamination
biodiversity ÿ synthetic elementary precision agriculture ÿ low food quality

material overuse ÿ environmental ÿ basic rural telecom infrastructure • Asymmetric and Fragmented Information
pollution ÿ climate change • Lack of Intelligence ÿ supply and demand imbalance
ÿ weak data integration ÿ ÿ price volatility
• Public Health weak element tracking capability ÿ multi- ÿ food scarcity
• Animal Welfare sources and heterogeneity ÿ secure data ÿ lack of food traceability
sharing • Inefficient Supply Chain
• Need of Industrialized Small Farm ÿ food loss
ÿ food waste
B. Industrialized Agricultural Production Process capability in agricultural information systems hinder multi scale
analysis, environment reproduction, and make it difficult to
1) Current Status: The mechanization revolution in discover biological knowledge. The use of
agricultural production has ended or is experiencing a rapid transition
big data in agriculture is challenging as agricultural data are
in most countries. Agricultural machinery and equipment are collected from individuals, research groups, and companies
now widely used during the entire production process, including using different types of devices, which causes multi-sources
land preparation, crop planting, fertilization, harvesting, and heterogeneity problems [32]. In addition, secure data
animal feeding, and food processing. Agricultural mechaniza sharing between multiple groups is an obstacle to the full
tion significantly reduces manual work and improves produc exploitation of agricultural big data. Consequently, the above
tivity, so that fewer farmers can provide more food to meet the discussed issues need to be addressed from all perspectives on
high global demand for food. More excitingly, the innovation standardization, technological innovation, and legislation.
of information and communication technology (ICT) and Last but not least, most of the developed mechanized agri
its integration with agricultural production is promoting the cultural machinery and systems are for large farms since large
digital farming transformation. Sensors are used to measure scale monoculture farming is their main production pattern.
the status of soil and plant leaves for precise microclimate However, different kinds of small farms are widely distributed
control [28]. Low-power wide area networks and wireless mesh across the world [33], especially in developing countries.
networks are deployed to report the data generated during In addition, the benefits of small farms are gradually recognized
agricultural production [29]. Large-scale farmland monitoring, [34], [35]. Distributed small farms would be a possible
crop identification, and yield forecasting are available through agricultural production pattern for sustainable agriculture in
remote sensing [30]. the era of Industry 4.0. Therefore, the industrialization of small
2) Lessons Learned: Compared to the advanced industrial farms also should be paid significant attention [36], [37].
production processes, the automation capability in agricultural
production process is limited due to the following two barriers: C. Industrialized Agri-food Supply Chain
lack of digitization and lack of intelligence in agriculture. 1) Current Status: It usually involves five stages from farm
Most of the agriculture machines in use are still pre-digital. to fork, namely, food production, industrial processing,
The analog equipment works independently and is manually distribution, retail, and consumption. A few types of vegetables,
operated by humans. To further improve the automation fruits, or animals are mass produced on each farm. After the
capability, full connectivity of agricultural machinery is vital harvesting and selection by farmers, these agricultural foods
during the whole production process. Precision agriculture is products are sent to rural cooperatives or food brokers for
still in its preliminary stage. Real-time monitoring of farmland, industrial processing such as sorting, grading, and packaging.
livestock, and other agricultural activities through wireless The food products are then aggregated to the top wholesalers
sensor networks (WSNs) are currently in small-scale and in each region through transportation and logistics services.
short-term due to the high deployment and maintenance cost. Thousands of food retailers such as supermarkets, farmers'
Further improvement is needed in the network bandwidth and markets, and grocery stores in the region need to place orders
delivery latency to ensure large-scale high-throughput plant for the food products from the top wholesalers to make food
phenotyping [31]. In rural areas, the lack of telecommunications products available for sale. Finally, consumers can purchase
infrastructure can only provide limited signal coverage, their favorite vegetables, fruits, and meats conveniently at retail
making it difficult to increase agricultural productivity. outlets. This model is commonly referred to as business-to-
Furthermore, weak data integration and element tracking business-to-consumer (B2B2C) [38].
5
In recent years, the integration of the Internet and agriculture Communications Satellite
has promoted new food supply models such as online-to
offline (O2O) [39], social commerce [40], and customer-to Sat Nav Remote Sensing Satellite
customer (C2C) [41]. These models greatly improve shopping
convenience, as prospective customers could search and
order preferred food products online. Then the products could
be either picked up in stores or delivered at home.
2) Lessons Learned: The three lessons learned in the agri Drone Swarm
food supply chain are food safety issue, asymmetric and
fragmented information, and an inefficient supply chain.
First, accidental and deliberate food contamination incidents
have occurred too often in the last decades. These incidents
usually result from the use of prohibited chemicals, unsafe raw
materials, unapproved food additives, as well as insufficient
poor storage and poor transportation conditions. Food fraud
and low food quality lead to significant negative impacts on Underground WSNs Underwater WSNs
public health and consumer confidence. Therefore, ensuring
transparency and traceability throughout the entire agri-food Fig. 2. Space-Air-Ground-Undersurface Integrated Network (SAGUIN) for
supply chain is essential to prevent food fraud, improve the ubiquitous agriculture sensing and networking.
quality of food, and finally boost consumer confidence.
Second, asymmetric information between food production
sectors and end consumers leads to an imbalance between A.Internet of Things
supply and demand, price volatility, and foods scarcity.
Fragmented information exchange or even data isolation 1) Key Applications of IoT in Agriculture: The IoT, as a core
across the agri-food supply chain causes inadequate technology in Industry 4.0, is transforming many aspects of
communication between multiple actors and the lack of food traceability.
our daily lives by creating a smart connected world. Some use
These, in turn, affect logistics efficiency, cost containment, risk cases are smart home, industrial internet, and connected
management, customer intimacy, and consumer confidence. vehicles. Accordingly, it is also expected to encourage the
Thus, it is urgent to realize a consistent interconnection be agricultural sector. The agricultural applications of IoT include
tween all the elements, so that data and discovered knowledge precision farming, livestock monitoring, smart greenhouse,
could be efficiently shared among the elements in the agri- fishery management, and weather tracking. As these
food supply chain. agricultural applications of IoT were comprehensively reviewed
Third, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization in [12], [17], [18], we herein discuss them at a general level,
of the United Nations, more than 30% of the world's food namely Space-Air-Ground-Undersurface Integrated Network
produced each year is not consumed due to food loss and (SAGUIN) for ubiquitous agriculture sensing and networking.
food waste. Food loss occurs at every stage of the agri-food
The paradigm of SAGUIN is demonstrated in Fig. 2. It would
supply chain, especially during food harvesting, sorting,
be realized through the combination of remote sensing,
grading, and processing. This is due to the lack of technology
drones, smart agricultural vehicles, WSNs, and mobile crowd
and adequate management, such as a mismatch in supply
sensing. Based on national and commercial space
and demand, poor food quality, and lack of processing
infrastructure, the establishment of remote sensing satellite
techniques, in the existing agri-food supply chain. Meanwhile,
constellation would be able to provide full coverage acquisition
food waste usually happens during the later stages in
of agricultural information, which is especially efficient for
distribution, retailing, and consumption. This is mainly because
crop production forecasting, yield modeling, pest identification, and so on.
the food is damaged or spoiled during the logistics process, In addition, the advanced unmanned aerial vehicles equipped
expires at retailers, or consumers end. Accordingly, it is
with hyperspectral sensors, multispectral cameras, and other
essential to further improve the technical and managerial
novel instruments can provide fast emergency responses and
capabilities throughout the agri food supply chain to prevent food loss and waste.
improve observation precision through high-throughput 3D
monitoring at different geographical areas. Finally, different
kinds of agricultural sensor nodes, autonomous farm vehicles,
III. INDUSTRY 4.0 TECHNOLOGIES IN AGRICULTURE and mobile crowdsensing are responsible for ground and un
dersurface perception. Thanks to advances in communication
Using emerging Industry 4.0 technologies in agricultural technologies, different types of wireless networks (eg, 5G,
production and agri-food supply chain management provides LoRa, NB-IoT, Sigfox, ZigBee, and WiFi) can be chosen to
an opportunity to address the limitations discussed above. meet the diverse service requirements in agricultural
Correspondingly, the blueprint of Agriculture 4.0 would also applications (such as real-time remote equipment control,
be realized. Five emerging technologies on key applications high throughput plant phenotyping) for better coverage,
for Agriculture 4.0 and research challenges are discussed below. connection density, bandwidth, and end-to-end latency.
2) Research Challenges of IoT in Agriculture: Several Robotics and Autonomous

technological issues, however, are faced when applying IoT Systems in Agriculture
to agriculture, which are discussed as follows:
a) Professional Agricultural Sensors: Many issues arise New Agricultural New Agricultural
when it comes to environmental sensing in agriculture. Production Patterns Production Processes
Precision agriculture requires a variety of sensors to be
deployed on the farm fields, crop plants, animals, and • Plant Factory • Autonomous Farming
agricultural equip ment. However, the lack of professional
sensors is a serious obstacle for fine-grained agriculture
• 3D Food Printing • Aerial Spraying/Monitoring
monitoring, especially in livestock biosensing and plant
phenotyping. To address this issue, professional agricultural
• Biodiverse Farming • Automatic Husbandry
sensors with high quality, high resolution, and high reliability
need to be designed and developed for the perception of
Fig. 3. Six
agricultural production environments and physiological signs of animals andkeyplants.
applications of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) in
The study of sensorless agricultural sensing with radio signals the agricultural industry.
could be another direction. For example, WiFi signals can be
used to perform accurate measurement for soil moisture and applications of IoT in agricultural environments mean that
electrical conductivity [42]. cellular-based networks, 802.15.4 mesh networks, Bluetooth
b) Wireless Power Transfer and Ambient Energy low-energy networks, and LoRa networks would coexist in the
Harvesting: Low-power sensing is essential in agricultural same location. Therefore, cross-technology communication
environ ments as a large number of sensors are placed under different physical layers [48] is a fundamental research
underground, underwater, on trees, and on livestock, making issue to improve the interoperability in agricultural IoT.
it difficult to replace of the batteries of the sensors. Wireless d) Robust Wireless Networks: The complex agricultural
power transfer is promising to eliminate the need for battery environment poses severe challenges to reliable wireless
replacement by recharging the batteries through electromagnetic communication.
waves. First, experimental results have shown that
However, long-distance wireless charging is needed in most temperature variations significantly affect the reliability of
agricultural applications. Wireless power transfer under ex 802.15.4 mesh networks [49] and LoRa networks [50] in both
treme environments like underground and underwater is also packet reception and received signal strength. It was also
a challenge that needs to be studied in the future. Photovoltaic demonstrated that radio signal strength is associated with
agricultural IoT [43] is presented recently, in which agricultural relative humidity [51]. Second, human presence, movement of
activities and electricity production coexist in the same area. animal, plant, and other obstacles lead to the fluctuations in
In this case, distributed wireless chargers are capable of the received signal strength due to multipath effect. Therefore,
supplying energy to sensing devices, but adaptive task robust network protocols are needed to cope with the changing
scheduling of energy transfer is an issue due to the diversity weather conditions and the dynamic agricultural environment.
of sensing devices for agricultural applications. Furthermore, Third, heterogeneous agricultural IoT networks and dense
ambient energy harvesting is another solution toward deployment would cause severe wireless interference and
sustainable agricultural IoT. Some pilot studies have shown degrade the quality of service. To mitigate this issue, efficient
that sensor nodes could harvest energy from rivers [44], fluid channel scheduling between heterogeneous sensing devices,
flow, movement of vehicles [45], and ground surface [46]. But cognitive radio assisted WSNs, and emerging networking
the power conversion efficiency needs to be further improved primitives such as concurrent transmission [52] are expected
since the converted electrical energy is limited at present. to be further explored for agricultural applications.
c) Cross-Media and Cross-Technology Communication:
The diverse nature of agricultural environments means that a
single standard network solution is not sufficient for all the B. Robotics and Autonomous Systems
applications. Likewise, agricultural sensing devices are 1) Key Applications of RAS in Agriculture: Robotics and
distributed at indoor greenhouses, outdoor farmlands, under autonomous systems (RAS), an integration of many emerging
ground areas or even water areas. The diversity of the technologies (such as robotics, computer vision, AI, and
environment means that different types of wireless control systems), have been widely used in industrial man
communication methods based on radio frequency, sonar, ufacturing to increase productivity, improve the reliability of
vibration, and other signals are needed for information products, and replace human to do repetitive tasks. Meanwhile,
exchange. Hence, it is necessary to examine the performance agricultural production is being fundamentally transformed by
of different wireless communication methods in each situation applying RAS into the agricultural industry.
to determine the suitable technologies. Cross-media As shown in Fig. 3, plant factory, 3D food printing, and
communication between underground, underwater, and air biodiverse farming are three key applications that have the
[47] is also crucial toward the complete incorporation of smart potential to be new agricultural production patterns in in
sensing into agricultural environments. Similarly, requirements industrial agriculture. At present, it is difficult to expand the
in terms of network size, node density, transmission distance, world's agricultural land to preserve forestation. More than
throughput, latency are diverse for different agricultural purposes.20%
The of farmland in the world is heavily degraded, while the
diverse
rest of the agricultural area is under threat. Plant factory [53] Agricultural Environment
looks promising to meet global food demand and sustainable
use of natural resources. 3D food printing [54] is becoming an
alternative to producing food in an automated additive agronomy horticulture forestry aquaculture livestock farming
manufacturing manner. In biodiverse farms, multiple crops are
grown simultaneously on a farmland. The crop diversity helps
to make soil nutrients more balance, and to protect against Stage 1: Stage 2: Stage 3:
Navigation Detection Stock
diseases and pests. With the help of agricultural robotics,
• path following • feature selection • object localization
limitations such as low productivity and intensive manual labor
• trajectory tracking • classification • task allocation
could be solved. It should be noted that biodiverse farming
• obstacle avoidance • human-robot
also increases the complexity in the application of agricultural
• collective motion interaction
robotics due to variation in detection, classification, harvesting,
and other agricultural activities. The technical challenges will
be discussed later on. Fig. 4. The core operation stages in agricultural robotics along with key
tasks [66].
On the other hand, RAS is also transforming the agricultural
production process, where the key applications include au
tonomous farming, aerial spraying and monitoring, automatic b) Accurate Detection: In the second stage, the two urgent
animal husbandry, etc. Smart tractors [55] would work collab tasks are suitable biological feature selection and robust object
oratively to generate operational routes and intelligently avoid classification for the following reasons. First, multi spectral
barriers in the field to ensure the safety for both farmland and image is commonly chosen as a feature in selective spraying
humans. Robotic weeders [56] can differentiate weeds from and mechanical weeding removal applications, so that the
crops through computer vision, and then precisely spray the agricultural robots can differentiate weeds from crops.
herbicide on weeds only or directly eradicate them without However, the dynamic and complex farm environment makes
harming the crops. Picking and harvesting robots [57] help it challenging to precisely classify plants because of the
farmers to collect tomatoes, citrus, apples, and strawberries changing appearance, growth stage, weather condition, object
more efficiently. They recognize fruits and vegetables in the overlapping, or even partial occlusion [67], [68]. Second, the
field, determine their location, and harvest the ripe ones in robots used for automatic harvesting should be capable of
boxes. Since operating speed is dozens of times faster than identifying the different types of fruits and vegetables, their
ground machines, aerial crop spraying and monitoring [58] has maturity, size, texture properties for precision picking, quality
attracted considerable attention recently. Finally, RAS also grading, and other purposes. Unfortunately, the dif ferent
contributes to animal husbandry such as automatic feeding, kinds of plants and unstructured orchard with dynamic
milking, and herding. environmental conditions lead to performance degradation
2) Research Challenges of RAS in Agriculture: We can see [69] when classical pattern recognition methods are applied to
that, from Fig. 4, three research challenges in agricultural RAS agricultural practices. Unreliable classification methods would
are autonomous navigation, accurate detection, and intelligent undoubtedly cause serious losses to agricultural production.
action. The detail discussions are presented as follows: Third, the large fields in breeding nurseries need to be rapidly
a) Autonomous Navigation: In the first stage, RAS should monitored in a short duration for the germinated crop detection
make sense of the target in the agricultural environment to so that the best plant seeds can be found for future breeding.
fulfill path following [59], trajectory tracking [60], obstacle This requires fast classification methods to distinguish the
avoidance [61], or collective motion [62]. Accurate guidance is good and bad crop seeds germination [70]. Therefore, there is
extremely important since it affects crop protection, human a need to solve these problems for the improvement in
safety, operation costs, and work efficiency. Currently, the detection accuracy and operational
global navigation satellite system (GNSS), camera vision, and effectiveness. c) Intelligent Action: Finally, the specific
laser imaging detection and ranging (LIDAR) scanner are three tasks such as robot-assisted plant phenotyping [71], fruit
popular techniques for autonomous driving. However, each counting and harvesting [72], leaf peeling [73], selective
one has limitations when used alone in agricultural spraying [74], and 3D mapping [58] are completed during internship action.
environments. For example, satellite signal attenuation and Three fundamental research concerns are object localization,
task allocation, and human-robot interaction. Accurate object
multipath effects frequently occur in orchards and greenhouses [63].
The performance of computer vision-based navigation system localization is the core requirement to ensure inerrant
is often degraded due to unstable light conditions in farm fields operations and minimize the external influences from the
and plant growth [64]. Although LIDAR scanner-based surroundings. Optimized task sequence planning of individual
navigation systems outperform the other two approaches in agricultural robot systems and coordination between multiple
orchard and grove scenarios, the overhanging tree branches, robots are critical to improving performance in terms of energy
moving objects, and other obstacles affect its performance on efficiency, time consumption, and reliability. Human-robot
tree row detection [65]. Therefore, novel guidance algorithms interaction has been widely studied in the industrial domain,
and control strategies are needed. Moreover, the combination but the progress in agriculture is still nascent. Proper interaction
of these techniques with data fusion is helpful to ensure between farmers and autonomous agricultural machinery are
navigation accuracy and robustness. extremely necessary to improve productivity, profitability, and
prevent potential accidents [75]. Last but not least, robotic arm
design is equally important as different types of grippers need
to be developed for enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency
following their specific applications.
Agriculture Decision Mobile Predictive

robots Support System Expert System Analytics
c.Artificial Intelligence
• weed control • precision farming • • diseases diagnosis • • seasonal forecasting
1) Key Applications of AI in Agriculture: As demonstrated •
crop harvesting livestock monitoring • species recognition •
•
crop yield prediction
above, AI plays an important role in RAS. With classification, • fruit picking • labor management • soil health analysis • price forecasting •
grading and sorting food supply chain • farm at hand production insights
logistical regression, association analysis, and decision-making
capabilities, AI is also being applied to other applications in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Agriculture
agriculture, such as agricultural decision support system
(ADSS), mobile agricultural expert system, and agricultural
Fig. 5. Key applications of AI and big data in agricultural industry.
predictive analytics.
Four use cases of ADSS are reviewed in [22], which
includes mission planning, water resources management, b) Gap between Farmers and AI Researchers: Seam
climate change adaptation, and food waste control. While a less translation from agricultural problems to decision-making
recent work [24] focused on the review of crop data models is crucial for the success of adopting AI in agriculture.
management, in which its decision-making capability enabled Farmers are often met with a lot of difficulties in the agri
by ADSS was presented. Moreover, intelligent animal health cultural production process, but AI researchers are not aware
monitoring systems is a major focus of today's research and of these agricultural problems, which could be fixed by AI
drive the growth of AI in agriculture markets. Animal technology. More importantly, AI is practical only after the
wearables, computer vision systems, and other sensing nature of these agricultural problems and solutions are fully
devices can capture the status of animals in real-time. Then, understood. However, AI researchers usually do not know
the intelligence engine helps analyze livestock health, animal much about professional agricultural knowledge. Thus, it is
welfare, production, etc. In recent years, many technological important to link farmers, agricultural professionals and AI
advances have been made in the area of intelligent animal researchers together to bridge the gap.
health monitoring. The advancement in biosensors was summarized inc)[76] and [77].Secure Machine Learning: To success
Distributed
Machine vision approaches for animal behavior detection was fully implement an artificial neural network, fuzzy control
reviewed in [78]. A recent study [79] systematically discussed system, and other AI engines in agriculture, a huge amount of
the ADSS for intelligent aquaponics. Also, a pilot study [80] data is needed to train AI models. However, the related data
shows that digital twin technology is helpful to prevent animal on agriculture is much less than that in the industrial field due
diseases in livestock.
to the lack of digitization in agriculture, inaccessible data, as
As shown in Fig. 5, mobile expert system is another key well as privacy protection issues. With the help of deploying
application of AI in agriculture. Farmers can now easily use 5G infrastructure in rural areas [82], SAGUIN, and novel
smartphones to identify plant pests and diseases [81]. sensors, massive agricultural data could be collected in the future.
They are also able to identify soil problems on their own with Novel ML techniques such as federated learning [83] are
the help of mobile apps. In addition, the progress of farmland expected to be explored for farm data protection in agricultural
can be tracked by satellite imagery, which is then analyzed by AI applications.
AI engine. Mobile apps simultaneously visualize the result so
that farmers could understand the status remotely.
Finally, AI-enabled agricultural predictive analytics and big D.Big Data Analytics
data technology are capable of forecasting weather conditions, 1) Key Applications of Big Data in Agriculture: IoT helps
predicting crop yields, modeling agricultural market volatility, collect data in every step of the agricultural production and
and performing price estimation. Based on these observations, agri-food supply chain management. Thus, it would also be
professional insights in production can be provided to farmers, beneficial to implement big data analytics during food
as well as to guide companies to optimize business resources. production, processing, logistics, and marketing. Data-driven
2) Research Challenges of AI in Agriculture: Although these agri cultural industry would profoundly transform the production
applications are promising, agriculture is one of the most and consumption behaviors [12]. For instance, ADSS, mobile
challenging practical areas for AI for the following reasons: agricultural expert system, and agricultural predictive analytics
a) Hard to Find Single Standard Solution: Unlike the all rely on the power of big data, which can provide smart
standardized industrial environment, the conditions in the recommendation to farmers toward precision farming [84].
agricultural fields are constantly changing, making statistical Accurate risk assessment could help farmers to better manage
quantification difficult. All the factors such as weather, soil agricultural risks in terms of production, market, institutional
quality, and visited pests have an impact on AI's performance. risk, along with personal and financial risk [85].
As a result, a machine learning (ML) algorithm that performs Moreover, big data plays a key role in agri-food supply chain
a task well in one field may fail in neighboring fields, not to management in addressing to solve food safety, imbal ance
mention in other regions. supply, as well as food loss and waste. For example, the
data-driven agricultural solution for sustainability management Agrifood Supply Chain

in the by-products supply chain was introduced in [15]. A
comprehensive discussion about the impacts of big data
analysis on the agri-food supply chain was presented in [25], Provider Famer Broker Processor Wholesaler Retailer Consumer
from multiple perspectives, including functional impact,
economic impact, environmental impact, social impact,
Internet of Things
business impact, and technological impact.
2) Research Challenges of Big Data in Agriculture: Recent
literature [25], [84], [86] have presented comprehensive QR Code GNSS Bar Code Sensor RFID Camera Crowdsensing
discussions on the challenges of adopting big data analytics
in agriculture. Our observations are summarized below:
a) Technical Issues: The IoT can provide fine-grained Blockchain Smart Contract
monitoring for every aspect during food growing, processing,

transportation, and retailing, which means the problem of
agricultural data scarcity would be solved. However, it is
challenging to integrate disparate data as that come from
thousands of individual farmlands, animal factories, and Fig. 6. Blockchain smart contract for traceable agri-food supply chain.
enter prize applications. Therefore, data interoperability is
essential to maximize the value of massively dispersed data
after systematic data collection, storage, processing, and expected to be enabled by blockchain-based smart contract
knowledge mining. On the other hand, the lack of decentralized technologies toward a traceable, transparent, trustful, and
ML and data management systems decreases the willingness intelligent ecosystem.
of multiple actors to share agriculture data. Plant phenotyping Many blockchain-based smart contract solutions have
is particularly important for agricultural and ecological been proposed in recent years. For example, a practical
sciences to investigate the interaction between genotype, implementation of a blockchain-based traceability solution
environment, and phenotype. Thus, an agricultural information called Agri BlockIoT [88] was presented at the IoT Vertical
system is expected to track environmental parameters and and Topical Summit on Agriculture. A blockchain-based smart
metadata associated with plant growth [87]. In this regard, contract approach for soybean traceability was proposed in
the ability to link objects and corresponding events, as well [89]. The application of the grain supply chain with blockchain
as tracking the occurrences of every event in the spatial- was demonstrated in [90]. Other related studies were shown
temporal scale, and mining biological knowledge should be in [91] and [92]. Similarly, smart contract for agriculture is
greatly improved. Last but not least, attention still needs to paid great attention by many blockchain startups, such as
be paid to other technical issues regarding decision support AgriLedger, AgriDigital, AgriChain, and Ripe. All of them have
tools, data quality, proposed their solutions for the agri-food supply chain management.
security, storage, and openness. b) Social Issues: Cybersecurity is important in every facet of society,
Farmer participation is a key factor toward the success of big including our daily life, business management, industrial
data in agriculture. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate production, not to mention the agricultural sector. Data
practical benefits for farmers, so that they are willing to integrity attacks through data tampering and rogue data
participate in the value chain of agricultural data exchange. injection are the first threat in precision farming applications.
Another hurdle is the shortage of agricultural big data experts. For example, a smart irrigation system would schedule the
Most skilled big data engineers, data analysts, and scientists wrong watering run times because rogue data is inputted into
are not at agricultural universities or agriculture related an AI module running the system. The second threat is
enterprises. The cultivation of interdisciplinary talents with confidentiality attacks through packet sniffing and system
rich knowledge of agriculture and big data analytics would be onebackdoor.
possible Farmers
solution to would suffer
bridge a great deal of financial loss
the gap.
and negative emotional impacts if sensitive agricultural
information such as crop yields, cultivation methods, and
E.Blockchain
livestock health conditions are disclosed to third parties. The
1) Key Applications of Blockchain in Agriculture: Smart third threat is agricultural IoT network attacks against
contract (or distributed ledger technology) and cybersecurity availability through the distributed denial of sleep [93],
are two key applications of blockchain in agriculture. Fig. 6 malicious reporting, and other attacks. For instance, the
demonstrates a blockchain-based smart contract for traceable embedded sensing devices would quickly exhaust energy
agri-food supply chain. The IoT provides fine-grained sensing under the denial of sleep attacks. The false instructions and
throughout the entire supply chain. With smart contract, all information reporting from malicious nodes would lead to
the transactions are recorded in a decentralized manner. An serious consequences and even disasters in autonomous farming and sm
immutable transaction history from providers of raw materials These observations demonstrate that wireless network
to consumers would help to improve food quality control, defense and privacy protection are crucial in the agriculture
increase traceability, and finally overcome food safety issue. do main. The security and privacy solutions for IoT
The digital transformation of the agri-food supply chain is applications are surveyed in [23]. Interestingly, it discussed the adaptation
10
TABLE III
THE TAKE-HOME MESSAGES OF ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES TOWARD AGRICULTURE 4.0
Enabling Technology Key Application Research Challenge

Internet of Things • Space-Air-Ground-Undersurface Integrated Network • • Professional Agricultural Sensors
Precision Farming • • Wireless Power Transfer & Ambient Energy Harvesting
Livestock and Fishery Monitoring • Cross-Media & Cross-Technology Communication
• Smart Greenhouse • Robust Wireless Networks
Robotics • Plant Factory • 3D Food Printing • Autonomous Navigation
• Biodiverse Farming • Autonomous Farming • Accurate Detection
• Aerial Spraying & Monitoring • Automatic Husbandry • Intelligent Action
Artificial Intelligence • Agricultural Robot • • Hard to Find Single Standard Solution
& Agricultural Decision Support System • • Gap between Farmers and AI Researchers
Big Data Analytics Mobile Agricultural Expert System • • Distributed Secure Machine Learning
Agricultural Predictive Analytics • Technical and Social Issues with Big Data
blockchain • Smart Contract • Interoperability • Scalability
• Cyber security • Energy Consumption • Security and Privacy
of these approaches into agriculture and analyzed blockchain confidentiality, privacy, and integrity assurance. However, like
based privacy protection for agriculture applications. other popular network technologies, blockchain has become
2) Research Challenges of Blockchain in Agriculture: The a target for hackers, who can launch cyber-attack from the
adoption of blockchain during agri-food production and supply protocol side, implementation side, and logical defect. AT
chain management is an opportunity to improve traceability, detailed survey on cyber-attack in a blockchain network and
transparency, and trust among providers, farmers, suppliers, recent advances can be found in [99].
retailers, and consumers. However, many technical bottlenecks
need to be resolved to adopt blockchain technology in agri IV. CONCLUSION
culture. These bottlenecks are listed as follows: Monoculture and intensive animal farming are the main
a) Interoperability: Currently, thousands of blockchains agricultural production patterns in today's industrial agriculture.
projects are active. They are developed on a wide variety However, the damage to the ecological environment,
of platforms with different programming languages, protocol public health, and animal welfare are big limitations. Although
stacks, and security mechanisms. The lack of interoperability presently, the agricultural production process is mechanized
leads to network isolation problems, where the different types and computerized, the lack of digitization and intelligence
of blockchain networks can hardly communicate with each are major obstacles to improving the automation capability.
other. To integrate existing blockchain networks, it is necessary Moreover, the agri-food supply chain at the current stage is not
to propose novel architecture, interoperable communication intelligently managed. To address these issues, it is essential to
protocol, and improved middleware so that efficient cross integrate emerging Industry 4.0 technologies into agriculture.
blockchain communication [94], [95] is realized. Hence, in this study, we present detailed discussions on the key
b) Scalability: Unlike the Visa transaction network, applications and research challenges when these technologies
which is capable of processing thousands of transactions in meet agriculture. For the ease of readers, the take-home
a second, the transaction speed in blockchain-based smart messages are summarized in Tables II and III.
contract networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are less than
20 per second [96]. Fast response time and high network ACKNOWLEDGMENT
throughput are essential since innumerable transactions need The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers
to be processed when millions of actors in the entire supply for their constructive feedback. The authors also would like to
chain are involved in the integrated networks. thank the icon authors from Flaticon (www.flaticon.com). This
c) Energy Consumption: Apart from the huge amount of work was supported in part by the National Natural Science
energy expended by bitcoin mining, the complex consensus Foundation of China under Grant 61902188, the Fundamental
mechanisms in transaction validation also lead to high energy Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant
consumption. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the complex KJQN202047, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
ity of blockchain networks for cost savings. For example, the under Grant 2019M651713.
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“Blockchain-based safety management system for the grain supply Lei Shu received the BS degree in computer
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[91] A. Shahid, A. Almogren, N. Javaid, FA Al-Zahrani, M. Zuair, and M. China, in 2002, and the MS degree in computer
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IEEE Access, vol. 8, p. 69,230–69,243, 2020. Korea, in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree from the
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based on blockchain and epcis,” IEEE Access, vol. 7, p. 20,698–20,707, University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland, in 2010.
2019. Until 2012, he was a Specially Assigned Researcher
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Graduate School of Information Science and
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Decision and Information Technologies (CoDIT), April 2019 , p. 1025– Technology, Osaka University, Japan. He is currently
1030. a Distinguished Professor with the Nanjing Agricultural University, China, and
[94] IA Qasse, M. Abu Talib, and Q. Nasir, “Inter blockchain communication: a Lincoln Professor with the University of Lincoln, UK He is also the Director
A survey,” in Proceedings of the ArabWIC 6th Annual International of the NAU-Lincoln Joint Research Center of Intelligent Engineering.
Conference Research Track, ser. ArabWIC 2019. New York, NY, USA: He has served on the Editorial Boards, including the IEEE Transactions on
Association for Computing Machinery, 2019. Industrial Informatics, IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Network
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Mohania, “Internet of blockchains: Techniques and challenges ahead,”
in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things ( iThings)
and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and
IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE
Smart Data (SmartData), July 2018, pp. 1574–1581.
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Challenges and solutions,” in Handbook of Research on Blockchain
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[98] T. Salman, M. Zolanvari, A. Erbad, R. Jain, and M. Samaka, “Security Gerhard Petrus Hancke received the B.Eng. and
services using blockchains: A state of the art survey,” IEEE M.Eng. degrees in computer engineering from the
Communications Surveys Tutorials, vol. 21, no. 1, p. 858–880, First University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa, in
quarter 2019. 2002 and 2003, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree
[99] M. Saad, J. Spaulding, L. Njilla, C. Kamhoua, S. Shetty, DH Nyang, and in computer science from the Security Group,
D. Mohaisen, “Exploring the attack surface of blockchain: A Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge,
comprehensive survey,” IEEE Communications Surveys Tutorials, pp . Cambridge, UK, in 2009. He is currently an
1–1, 2020. Associate Professor with the Department of
Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong, China. His research interests include
system security, embedded platforms, and
distributed sensing applications. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE
Ye Liu received the MS and Ph.D. degrees from Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Open Journal of the Industrial
Southeast University, Nanjing, China in 2013 and Electronics Society, IET Smart Cities, and Area Editor of Ad Hoc Networks.
2018, respectively. He was a visiting scholar at
Mon tana State University, Bozeman, USA from
October 2014 to October 2015. He was a visiting
PhD student from February 2017 to January 2018
in Networked Embedded Systems Group at RISE
SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science). He
is currently a researcher at Nanjing Agricultural
University. His current research interests include
wireless sensor networks, energy harvesting
systems, and mobile crowdsensing. He has published papers in prestigious
journals such as IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Internet of Things
Journal, ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing System, and IEEE
Network. He was awarded the 1st place of the EWSN Dependability Competition in 2019.
Adnan M. Abu-Mahfouz received his MEng and
PhD degrees in computer engineering from the
University of Pretoria. He is currently a Principal
Researcher at the Council for Scientific and
Xiaoyuan Ma received the BS and MS de grees Industrial Research (CSIR), Professor Extraordinaire
from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, at Tshwane University of Technology, Visiting
China, in 2010 and 2014, respectively. He is Profes sor at University of Johannesburg and
currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Extraordinary faculty member at University of
Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, CAS. He Pretoria. His research interests are wireless sensor
joined the Safety and Emergency Laboratory, and actuator network, low power wide area networks,
Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese software defined wireless sensor network, cognitive
Academy of Sciences, in 2011. His research radio, network security, network management, sensor/actuator node development.
interests include low power embedded wireless He is an associate editor at IEEE Access, IEEE Internet of Things and IEEE
systems (BLE, Zigbee, or LoRa), dependable IoT Transaction on Industrial Informatics, Senior Member of the IEEE and
communication, implementations of embedded Member of many IEEE Technical Communities. He is the founder of the
system and IoT network test tools. The network protocols proposed by him Smart Networks collaboration initiative that aims to develop efficient and
are able to work dependably under interference, which are awarded by secure networks for the future smart systems, such as smart cities, smart
EWSN'17-19 Dependability Com petitions with respect to reliability, latency, and energy
grid andconsumption.
smart water grid.

From Industry 4.0 To Agriculture 4.0 Current Status, Enabling Technologies, and Research

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been

From Industry 4.0 to Agriculture 4.0: Current

Subsequently, the advancement of embedded systems, soft ware

Target Application Field Technology Focused

Agricultural Production Pattern Agricultural Production Process Agrifood Supply Chain

• Intensive Animal Farming • Computerization • Online to Offline (O2O)

biodiversity ÿ synthetic elementary precision agriculture ÿ low food quality

2) Research Challenges of IoT in Agriculture: Several Robotics and Autonomous

Agriculture Decision Mobile Predictive

data-driven agricultural solution for sustainability management Agrifood Supply Chain

monitoring for every aspect during food growing, processing,

Enabling Technology Key Application Research Challenge

[90] X. Zhang, P. Sun, J. Xu, X. Wang, J. Yu, Z. Zhao, and Y. Dong,

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