Definition of Smart Farming:- “Smart farming” is an emerging concept that refers to managing farms using technologies like IoT, robotics, drones and AI. To increase the quantity and quality of products while optimizing the human labour required by production IoT is used.
WHAT IS SMART FARMING?
Smart Farming is an emerging concept that refers to managing farms using modern Information and Communication Technologies to increase the quantity and quality of products while optimizing the human labour required.
Besides there are some technologies based on IoT which are present for the farmers now-a-days:-
a) Sensors: Sensors for soil, water, light, humidity, temperature management.
b)Software: specialized software solutions for targeting specific farm types or use case agnostic IoT platforms.
c)Connectivity: Connecting devices like cellular, Lora, etc.
d)Location: Identifying locations with the help of GPS, Satellite, etc.
e)Robotics: Autonomous tractors, processing facilities, etc.
f)Data analytics: standalone analytics solutions, data pipelines for downstream solutions, etc.
Thus, with the help of these tools, farmers can monitor the field conditions without even going to the field and make a strategic decision for the whole farm or a single plant.
IoT in Smart Farming:-
Application of IoT in Smart farming could be a life-changer for humanity and the whole planet. But, we witness how extreme weather, deteriorating soil and drying lands, collapsing ecosystems that play a crucial role in agriculture make food production harder and harder.
In the era of internet and connected devices like the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big thing for the industry. But, we can assume that in next in the next 30 years the population of the world will exceed 6 billion and the incremental throughput for producing food will be 70% for this population. Incorporating IoT based smart agriculture systems is essential to cope up with this need.
Advantages of using IoT in Smart farming:-
- In Water Conservation:- Weather predictions and soil moisture sensors allow for water use only when and where needed.
- It helps in Real-Time Data and Production Insight:- Farmers can visualize production levels, soil moisture, sunlight intensity. And more in real-time and remotely to accelerate the decision-making process.
- To lower the Operation Costs:- Automating processes in planting, treatment and harvesting can reduce resource consumption, human error and overall cost.
- In Increasing the Quality of Production:- Analyzing production quality and results in correlation to treatment can teach farmers to adjust processes to increase the quality of the product.
- It helps in to detect Accurate Farm and Field Evaluation:- Accurately tracking production rates by field over time allows for detailed predicting of future crop yield and value of a farm.
- It helps into Improved Livestock Farming:- Sensors and machines can be use as to detect reproduction and health events earlier in animals. Geo-fencing location tracking can also improve livestock monitoring and management.
- It helps in Reducing the Environmental Footprint:- All conservation efforts such as water usage and increased production per land unit directly affect the environmental footprint positively.
- It helps in Drone Monitoring of the whole Area:- Local and commercial farmers can monitor multiple fields in multiple locations around the globe from an internet connection.
The IoT based Smart Farming Cycle:-
1. Selection of Required sensors
Selecting a proper sensor for the required purpose differs in every use cases. Eg the sensors required for livestock management is very different from the sensor requirements for a smart greenhouse use case.
2. Data collection
Collection of data from deployed sensors and converting them to the required format which helps the farmers to decide what they need to do in future.
3. Making decisions and deployment
Data collecting and taking decisions in accordance to the need is very necessary to get a good result.
4. Re-calibration of models
The results obtained from the previous data process should re-calibrating them based on the required result.
IoT solutions to Farming Problems:-
1.Precision Farming
2.Precision Livestock Farming
1. Precision Farming:- Precision farming, or precision agriculture, using in IoT-based approaches that make farming more controlled and accurate.
2. Precision Livestock Farming:- As in the case of precision agriculture, smart farming techniques enable farmers better to monitor the needs of individual animals and to adjust their nutrition accordingly, thereby preventing disease and enhancing their health.
SOME USE CASES BASED ON IoT:-
There are many types of IoT sensors and IoT applications that can be used in agriculture:-
Monitoring of Climate Conditions
It is the most popular smart agriculture gadget in weather stations, combining various smart farming sensors. It is located across the field, they collected various data from the environment and send it to the cloud. They provide precision farming i.e. to measure the climatic conditions, choose the appropriate crops and take the required measures to improve their capacity.
For e.g. allMETEO, Smart Elements, and Pycno
Greenhouse Automation
Weather stations can automatically adjust the conditions to match the given parameters. Especially, greenhouse automation system uses a similar principle.
For e.g. Farm app and Grow link products offers such capabilities in IoT agriculture products
Crop Management
One more type of IoT product in agriculture and another element of precision farming is crop management devices. It is placed in the field to collect data specific to crop farming from temperature and precipitation to leaf water potential and overall crop health.
For e.g. Arable and Semios serves good representations of how use cases 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 their performance.
E.g., SCR by Allflex and Cowler use smart agriculture sensors to deliver temperature, health, activity, and nutrition on each individual cow as well as collective about the herd.
End-to-End Farm Management System
It is a more complex approach to IoT products in agriculture and can be represented by the farm productivity management systems. It includes several agricultural IoT devices and sensors, installed on the premises as well as a powerful dashboard with analytical capabilities and in-built accounting or reporting features.
Things to Consider Before Developing A Smart Farming Solution:-
- To build an IoT solution for Farming, we need to choose proper sensors for our device. Our choice will depend on the types of information we want to collect.
2. We need to collect the proper data so we need powerful data analytics capabilities and applying predictive algorithms and machine learning to obtain actionable insights based on the collected data.
3. Maintenance of our hardware is the primary importance for IoT products in Farming.
4. Moreover, IoT devices should have proper mobility to access the information on-site or remotely via a smartphone or desktop computer.
5. On the other hand Infrastructure is very important to ensure that our smart farming application perform well.
IoT in SMART Farming and their Demand and Market Analysis:-
Internet of things technology is a network .which connects everything with the internet by radio frequency identification, sensors, global positioning systems following agreed protocol and exchange of information to achieve intelligent identification, monitoring and management.
In the last few years, Smart farming is transformed from small to medium farming operations to highly industrialized farming. The agriculture and farming sectors depend on innovative ideas and technologies to help increase yields and better allocate resources.
Growing crops and raising livestock and fish has become an increasingly mechanized and computer-driven operation. Smart farming is treated like manufacturing that measure and control data that is very important to manage costs, maximize yields, and boost profits.
This is a system for monitoring the crop field with the help of sensors and automating the irrigation system.
This makes use of remote sensors, robots, drones and computer imaging combined with continuously progressing machine learning and analytical tools for surveying the field, monitoring crop, and provide data to farmers for a management plan to save time and money.
Thus, It turns every action and element of farming into data and helps farmers to make an operational decision.
IoT in Agriculture Market: Drivers and Restraints
Drivers:
· Adoption of Agricultural Drones
On the other hand, Drones are used in Farming for crop health assessment, crop monitoring, planting, crop spraying, irrigation and field analysis. Drones are also used for gathering data via a series of sensors that are used for mapping, imaging and surveying of agricultural land. The data collected by drone is used to draw insights regarding plant counting, plant height, yield prediction, stockpile measuring, drainage mapping, weed pressure mapping and so on.
· Smart Greenhouses
Greenhouse farming helps to enhance the yield of crops, fruits and vegetable. The environment parameters are controlled manually in greenhouse farming. Which results in production loss and the method is less effective. Moreover, the Smart greenhouses designed with the help of IoT helps to monitor and control the environment and eliminate the manual intervention. But for controlling the environment different sensors are used according to the requirement. At the same time, the IoT sensors provide information on the light levels, humidity, pressure and temperature. But the sensors control the actuators automatically to control the heater, to turn light on, and open a window through the use of Wi-Fi.
· Precision Farming
Precision farming is a process that makes farming procedure accurate and controlled for raising livestock and growing crops. Moreover Component for this approach is the use of information technology and items like sensors, robotics, control systems, automated hardware, etc. But, the Crop Metrics a precision agriculture organization provides product and services including VRI optimization, which helps to improve yields and increase water use efficiency.
Restraints:
Lack of awareness in the farmer community restricts the growth of agriculture in the IoT market:-
Most of the farmer communities are not aware of the term internet of things. due to which there is less adoption of IoT in agriculture. But, Farmers are not given proper knowledge about the use of IoT in agriculture and this factor restricts the growth of agriculture IoT market.
IoT in Smart Farming: World-Wide Outlook
According to geography, North America and Europe hold significant market share in the agriculture IoT market. Moreover, Asia Pacific industrial agriculture IoT market is expected to grow as the countries in the region are highly adopting precision farming. Although Middle East & Africa are creating opportunities for farming and agriculture IoT market.
Thus, the report provides a depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators, and governing factors, along with market attractiveness as per segment. Moreover, the market report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.
World-Wide analysis includes:
- North America (U.S., Canada)
- Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Rest of LATAM)
- Western Europe (Germany, Italy, U.K, Spain, France, Nordic countries, BENELUX, Rest of Western Europe)
- Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Rest of Eastern Europe)
- Asia Pacific (China, Japan, India, South Korea, ASEAN, Australia & New Zealand, Rest of APEJ)
- Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries, Turkey, Northern Africa, South Africa, Rest of MEA)
CONCLUSION:-
Agriculture and Farming have seen many revolutions, whether the domestication of animals and plant a few thousand years ago. The systematic use of crop rotations and other improvements in farming practice a few hundred years ago or the “green revolution” with systematic breeding and widespread use of man-made fertilizers and pesticides a decades ago.
According to the reports, agriculture and farming are undergoing a fourth revolution triggered by the exponentially increasing use of IoT in farming. Thus, smart farming will revolutionize the world of farming and it will increase productivity as well as improve the quality and can save the lives of our farmers.
