The internet of things has transformed the face of many industries, and the farming sector isn’t a special case. Until 2018, the connected farming sector reached $1.8 billion worldwide, and the change hasn’t stopped yet. It is anticipated to increase $4.3 billion by the end of 2023 at a CAGR – Compound Annual Growth Rate of 19.3%.
The IoT tech has understood the smart wearables, connected devices, driverless cars, and automated machines. But, in agriculture, the IoT has engendered an enormous impact.
The recent stats showed that the worldwide population would reach 9.6 billion by 2050. The farming sector is forced to embrace the internet of things to feed this vast population. Apart from difficulties such as climatic changes, extreme weather conditions, and environmental impact, the internet of things suppresses these challenges and helps us meet the demand for more food supplies.
Mechanical innovations like harvesters and tractors took place throughout the globe and entered the agriculture operations in the late 20th century. The agriculture industry depends vastly on unique ideas because of consistently rising demand for food.
The industrial IoT has been responsible for more farming production at a reduced cost. In the next few years, the use of IoT smart solutions will increase agriculture operations.
IoT in Agriculture
With the emergence of industrial IoT in Agriculture, more developed sensors are being used. The sensors are now linked to the cloud via cellular networks. This allows us to know the up-to-date data from the sensors, making successful decision making.
The use of IoT in the farming industry has supported the farmers to supervise the water tank levels in real-time that makes the irrigation process more successful. The development of IoT tech in agriculture operations has driven the use of sensors in each step of the agriculture process, such as how much time and resources a seed takes to turn into a fully-grown vegetable.
IoT has come to a blessing for the farmers. The benefits that the farmers are getting by embracing IoT are dual. It has helped farmers reduce their costs and increase yield at the same time by enhancing farmer’s decision making with precise data.
Uses of IoT in Agriculture
Smart Farming is a high tech and successful system of doing agriculture and sustainably increasing food. It is the use of applying connected devices and unique technologies collectively into Farming. Smart Farming significantly relies on IoT, thus eradicating the need for farmers’ physical work, thus boosting efficiency in every manner possible.
IoT has brought significant benefits with recent farming trends such as productive use of water, improved inputs, and much more.
IoT-enabled Smart Farming enhances the entire farming system by examining the field in real-time. Apart from saving the farmer’s time, it also reduces the excessive use of resources like water and electricity.
Below are the five benefits of embracing the IoT technology:
1. Climate Conditions
Climate plays a significant role in agriculture. Lack of knowledge about climate can vastly deteriorate the quality and quantity of crop production. However, IoT enables you to know the actual weather conditions. Sensors are placed outside and inside of the farming fields. They accumulate data from the environment, which is used to pick suitable crops that can grow and survive in the specific climatic conditions. The entire IoT ecosystem is made up of sensors that can sense real-time weather conditions, such as rainfall, sunny, humidity, cloudy, and others. There are sensors to detect the crop condition and the weather around them.
2. Precision Farming
Precision Farming is one of the most popular uses of IoT in Farming. It facilitates more accurate and controlled farming practices by realizing smart agriculture applications like vehicle tracking, livestock monitoring, inventory monitoring, and field observation. Precision farming aims to evaluate the data produced via sensors to respond accordingly.
Precision Farming helps farmers produce data with the support of sensors and evaluate that information to make smart and fast decisions. There are many Precision Farming strategies, such as livestock management, irrigation management, vehicle tracking, and much more.
3. Smart Greenhouse
IoT has facilitated weather stations to naturally adjust the climate conditions to make our greenhouses smart, as per the specific sets of instructions. Application of IoT in Greenhouses has eradicated human interference, thereby making the whole process cost-effective and raising accuracy at the same time.
For instance, solar-powered IoT sensors develop modern and affordable greenhouses. These sensors gather and transmit real-time data that accurately evaluate the greenhouse state in real-time. Automatic and smart irrigation can be performed with the help of IoT.
4. Data Analytics
The modern database system does not have adequate storage for the data gathered from the IoT sensors. Cloud-based data storage and an end-to-end IoT platform play an essential role in the smart farming system. These systems are estimated to play a critical role such that better activities can be carried out. In the IoT world, sensors are the primary source of gathering data on a large scale. The data is evaluated and transformed into meaningful information using analytics tools. The data analytics helps in the evaluation of livestock conditions, weather conditions, and crop conditions.
5. Agricultural Drones
Technological developments have almost transformed the agricultural operations, and the launch of agriculture drones is a breakthrough. The Ground and Aerial drones are used to evaluate crop health, planting, crop supervising, crop spraying, and field analysis. Drone tech has rendered a high rise and makeover to the farming industry with proper strategy and planning based on actual time.
Smart drones have prevented environmental impact. The outcomes have been such that there has been a vast decline in chemicals reaching the groundwater.
The Endnote
IoT enabled agriculture has supported farmers by the implementation of modern tech solutions. This has connected the gap between production and quality-quantity yield. Data consumed by acquiring and importing information from the various sensors for real-time use or storage in a database guarantees rapid action and less damage to the crops. The smooth end-to-end smart operations and enhanced business process performance enable the faster production process and reach supermarkets in the quickest time possible.
