These days Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices impact on pretty much every aspect of our life – health and fitness, automotive and logistics, smart homes & cities and industrial IoT. Farming and agriculture have seen many technological transformations in the last decades, becoming more industrialized and technology-driven. In this way have we seen IoT, connected devices and automation find applications in the modern world of farming and agriculture.
By using smart agricultural technology, farmers have gained better control over the process of rearing livestock and growing crops, bringing about massive efficiencies of scale, cutting costs and helping to save scarce resources such as water. The adoption of IoT solutions for agriculture is constantly growing and the global smart agriculture market size is also expanding rapidly. With all of this in mind, in what way(s) can technologies such as IoT transform or improve agriculture?
Maintain control over the internal processes and thereby decrease production risks. The ability to foresee the output of your production allows you to plan for better product distribution. If you know exactly how much (crop) you are going to harvest, you can make sure your produce doesn’t lie around unsold.
With the enhanced control over production, waste levels can be reduced and costs can be more effectively managed. Insight into any anomalies in the rate of crop growth or health of livestock allows you to mitigate the risk of a diminished yield or even a complete crop failure.
Data collected by smart sensors can track things such as weather conditions, soil quality, crop’s growth progress or even cattle’s health. This data can be used to track the state of the operation in general as well as other factors such as staff performance, equipment efficiency, etc.
An effective IoT solution allows you to achieve better control over the production process and to maintain higher standards of crop quality and growth capacity through automation. As a result, you can eventually expect higher revenues. One specific type of IoT product that allows for precision farming are crop management devices. Similar to weather stations, they can be placed in the field to collect data specific to crop farming. Factors that can be tracked include temperature, precipitation, leaf water potential and overall crop health. By monitoring crop growth, and any anomalies, it is possible to effectively prevent diseases or infestations that can harm crop yield.
These are brought about via process automation. By using smart devices, you can automate multiple processes right across the production cycle; for example, irrigation, pest control or fertilisation. A very popular smart agriculture gadget are weather stations which combine various smart farming sensors. Located all over a farm, they collect various data from the environment and send it to the cloud. The provided measurements can be used to map the climate conditions, choose the appropriate crops, and take the required measures to improve their capacity.
When setting out to build an IoT solution for agricultural / farming purposes, you need to choose the sensors for your device (or create a custom one). Ultimately this will depend on the type of information that you want to collect and what you want to do with the resulting data.
