SMART AGRICULTURE BASED ON IOT
SMART AGRICULTURE BASED ON IOT
IoT is the present and future of every field impacting everyone’s life by making everything intelligent. IOT means Inter-networking of physical devices making a self-configuring network. It has the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to- human or human-to-computer interaction. IoT has a crucial role of transforming “Traditional Technology” from homes to offices to “Next Generation Everywhere Computing”.
Now, the most researching sector using IOT is “AGRICULTURE”. Because it is a really crucial sector to ensure food security as the global population is increasing rapidly. Agriculture products need applications like soil moisture monitoring, environmental condition monitoring for temperature, moisture, supply chain management and infrastructure management.
Do you believe that the future of agriculture is precision agriculture and it is expected to grow at 4 billion by 2023. Data generated from sensors on agriculture fields can also be used for Data analytics, which will help farmers to improve crop yields. IoT based smart farming can solve many agriculture-based issues.
Tools required for smart farming
- Sensors
- Telecommunication technologies
- Hardware and software
- Data analytics tool
- Satellites and drones
Applications of IOT in agriculture:
SOIL SAMPLING AND MAPPING
Main objective of soil analysis – determine the nutrient status of a field. Soil mapping opens the door to sowing different crop varieties in a specific field to better match soil properties accordingly, like seed suitability, time to sow, and even the planting depth . Sensors and vision based technologies are helpful to decide the distance and depth for sowing the seed efficiently
IRRIGATION
- Various controlled irrigation methods, like drip irrigation and sprinkler irrigation, are being promoted to tackle the water wastage issues.
- Both the crop quality and quantity are badly affected when facing water shortage, as irregular irrigation, even excess, leads to reduced soil nutrients and provokes different microbial infections
- A significant increase in crop efficiency is expected with the use of IoT based techniques, such as crop water stress index (CWSI)-based irrigation management
FERTILIZER
- A fertilizer is a natural or chemical substance that can provide important nutrients for the growth and fertility of plants
- Plants mainly need three key macronutrients: nitrogen (N) for leaf growth; phosphorus (P) for root, flowers, and fruit development; potassium (K) for stem growth and water movement
- Any sort of nutrients deficiency or applying them improperly can be seriously harmful for the plant health
- Fertilization under smart agriculture helps to precisely estimate the required dose of nutrients, ultimately minimize their negative effects on the environment
- IoT-based fertilizing approaches help to estimate the spatial patterns of nutrients requirements with a higher accuracy and minimum labor requirements
- Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) uses aerial/satellite images to monitor crop nutrient status
CROP DISEASE AND PEST MANAGEMENT
- The Great Famine, also known as the Irish Potato Famine, in which approximately one million Irish people died around 1950, resulted due to crop failure and yield reduction caused by ‘‘potato blight’’ disease
- Most of the pesticides are harmful to human and animal health, leaving severe, even irreversible, impact to the environment, ultimately causing significant contamination to entire ecosystems
- Recent IoT based intelligent devices, such as wireless sensors, robots and drones are allowing the growers to slash pesticide uses significantly by precisely spotting crop enemies
- Generally, the reliability of crop disease monitoring and pest management depends on three aspects: sensing, evaluating, and treatment
- The advanced disease and pest recognition approaches are based on image processing in which raw images are acquired throughout the crop area using field sensors, UAVs, or remote sensing satellites
YIELD MONITORING, FORECASTING, AND HARVESTING
- Yield monitoring is the mechanism used to analyze various aspects corresponding to agricultural yield, like grain mass flow, moisture content, and harvested grain quantity
- Yield quality depends on many factors, e.g. sufficient pollination with good quality pollen especially when predicting seed yields under changing environmental conditions
- Predicting the right harvesting time not only helps to maximize the crop quality and production but also provides an opportunity to adjust the management strategy
- Crop forecasting is an art to predict the yield and production (tons/ha) before the harvest takes place
- Although, harvesting is the last stage of this process, proper scheduling can make a clear difference
ADVANCED AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES
GREENHOUSE FARMING
- Success and production of various crops under such controlled environment depend on many factors, like accuracy of monitoring parameters, structure of shed, covering material to control wind effects, ventilation system, decision support system, etc
- Precise monitoring of environment parameters is the most critical task in modern greenhouses, where several measurement points of various parameters are required to control and ensure the local climate
VERTICAL FARMING
- VF in the form of urban agriculture offers an opportunity to stack the plants in a more controlled environment resulting in, most importantly, significant reduction in resource consumption
- By following this method, we can increase the production multiple times, as only a fraction of ground surface is required (depending on the number of stacks) as compared to traditional agriculture practice
- Human hands are not required to touch the crops at any stage when following the IoT-connected vertical farm
- Vertical Farming (VF) is an answer to meet the challenges of land and water shortages
HYDROPONIC
- A subset of hydroculture in which plants are grown without soil
- Hydroponic is based on an irrigation system in which balanced nutrients are dissolved in water and crop roots stay in that solution; in some cases, roots can be supported by medium like perlite or gravel
- Under this application, the precision of nutrient measurements is crucial, as such, a highly reliable wireless control system
PHENOTYPING
- This is based on emerging crop engineering, which links plant genomics with its ecophysiology and agronomy
- The progress in molecular and genetic tools for various crop breeding was significant in the last decade
- Research investigations conclude that plant phenotyping can be highly beneficial to investigate the quantitative characteristics, such as those are responsible for its growth, yield quality and quantity, and resistance capabilities to handle various stresses
- Furthermore, an IoT-based phenotyping platform can be designed to monitor the crop and relevant trait measurements that can provide facility for crop breeding and digital agriculture