IoT Technology in Agriculture
To meet the demand of the world’s population of 9.7 billion by 2050, the UN food and agriculture organisation outlined that the world will need to produce 70% more food to the world. This increase warrants the need for the agriculture sector to improve its overall production, which requires a look at adopting new innovative techniques to help aid farmers in adopting IoT systems.
One of the issues we are seeing today is the limited availability of natural resources such as fresh water and arable land which represents a big challenge. Another problem we see today is the decline in the agricultural workforce behind the operations, as more farmers are looking to adopt smarter solutions to help fill in the gaps in manual labour.
All of this constitutes the need for an IoT solution that can track, advise and change the outcome of the agricultural landscape to help overcome the difficult challenges we see today but also to prepare for the growing needs of tomorrow.
IoT solutions are developed to help farmers close the supply chain gap and increase productivity and the overall output of crop yields whilst increasing profitability and protection of the environment. The use of IoT technology ensures that the use of valuable resources is being used to achieve high crop yields, whilst reducing operational costs.
IoT in agriculture may consist of specialised equipment like wireless sensors, software and general IT solutions to help capture the relevant data needed to make informative decisions to boost the overall output of crops.
They go on to mention that this will increase year on year by 20% as the need for smart farming becomes widely used in the market, which means the smart agriculture market will triple by 2025, reaching $15.3 billion compared with $5 billion back in 2016.
The use of IoT smart agriculture technologies enables farmers to use data driven techniques to help reduce waste, increase productivity whilst reducing utilization of resources used on fields which eases the use of water, gas and electricity needed on conventional farms we see today.
IoT systems that are developed for farming are built prominently for monitoring and even be used to change the environment remotely so you do not have to worry about how your time is used onsite.
With this, farmers can interact with their crops remotely or setup automations to help look after large sections of their land without being present, which ultimately leads to the total management of one’s farm being accessible from anywhere in the world.
