With the vast growth in technologies, agriculture has become a more significant and useful domain. Various tools and techniques are accessible, which has enabled the modern age of agriculture. Today many industries have moved further to implement IoT technology for smart agriculture and farming to improve productivity, efficiency, and reach out to global markets.
What is IoT in agriculture?
IoT in agriculture is assisting farmers in trimming down generated wastes and boost productivity. That can come from the higher quantity of fertilizer that has been used to the number of journeys the agriculture vehicles have made. IoT is one of the types of technologies which help farmers to boost their productivity.
So, smart agriculture through IoT tools is essentially a hi-tech system of growing food that can be sustainable for the masses. It is the orientation and application of advanced Information & Communication Technologies into farming and agriculture.
What impacts will the Internet of Things IoT have on the agriculture sector?
The modernization in the technology has made sure that the new sensors are getting smaller, more effective, and more applicable. The networks are also effortlessly reachable so that smart farming and agriculture can be accomplished with full potential. Farmers today can get access to any needed data and information as well as track their agricultural sector.
An effective IoT solution must be able to work at three diverse levels:
- Allowing real-time gathering and precise presentation of data
- Enabling a solution that is reachable to global levels and not restricted to an operator or merely to the local networks
- Offering a solution that is simple to install, affordable, and low-powered.
Application of a Valuable IoT Solution in Agriculture Business
When a valuable IoT solution is applied in the agriculture business, then the farm must be able to optimize the use of labor, overall costs, precise quality, and yield in the below manner:
- Water
- Electricity
- Labor
- Reduction in stress levels
- Improved yields
Precise management of irrigation, which will lead to savings of water consumption by agricultural farms.
Allows saving funds by correct irrigation and less use of electricity.
No need for a devoted person to handle data logging. Preferably, this person can be resourcefully used somewhere else in the farming operations.
With the assistance of informed and timely decision-making, it will be possible to professionally handle the operations.
When all the factors mentioned above are taken care of, the outcome will be enhanced yields.
IoT Application in Agriculture for Smart Farming
Smart farming is an effective system of enabling agriculture and growing food in a better way. It is an application of facilitating connected devices and new technologies blended into agriculture. Smart farming majorly relies on IoT, thus getting rid of the requirements of farmers’ physical work and thus boosting productivity in all manners.
With the modern agriculture trends reliant on agriculture, the Internet of Things has brought immense advantages such as resourceful use of water, optimization of inputs, and other benefits. What made the real difference here are the drastic advantages of revolutionizing agriculture in the current days.
IoT based Smart Farming enhances the complete Agriculture system by tracking and monitoring the field on a real-time basis. With the assistance of sensors and interconnectivity, the IoT in Agriculture has saved the critical time of the farmers and trimmed down the excessive use of resources such as water and electricity. It helps in keeping numerous factors like humidity, temperature, soil, etc. under complete check and offers a precise crystal observation.
Benefits of IoT in Agriculture and Smart Farming
1) Enable Climate Conditions and Weather Scenarios
Climate plays a very crucial role in agriculture and farming. Working with inappropriate knowledge about the environment worsens the quantity and quality of agricultural production. However, IoT solutions facilitate you to know the real-time weather scenarios and conditions. The precise sensors are placed inside as well as outside of the agriculture fields. These sensors accumulate data from the environment, which is further utilized to select the right crops, which can better grow and sustain in the specific climatic conditions.
The complete IoT ecosystem is created of sensors that can spot real-time weather conditions such as humidity, rainfall, and temperature more accurately. There are multiple sensors obtainable to detect all these parameters and configure as per the smart farming needs. These sensors track and monitor the condition of the crops and the weather around them. If any troubling weather conditions are found, then notifications and alerts are sent. What gets eliminated is the physical presence requirement while disturbing climatic conditions, which ultimately boosts productivity and assists farmers in reaping more agricultural advantages.
2) Facilitate Precision Farming
Precision agriculture and farming are some of the most popular applications of IoT. It makes farming practice more accurate and controlled by enabling smart farming applications like livestock tracking and monitoring, vehicle tracking, field observations, and inventory tracking. The main objective of precision farming is to well analyze the information created through different sensors and react accordingly. With precision farming, farmers get the advantages of generating data with the assistance of sensors and analyze that data to make smart and swift decisions.
There are multiple precision farming techniques such as irrigation management, livestock handling, vehicle monitoring, and many more, which play a critical role in boost effectiveness. With the assistance of Precision farming, you can quickly analyze soil surroundings and applicable parameters to boost the overall operational effectiveness. Not only this, you can even detect the real-time functioning conditions of the connected devices to check water and nutrient levels.
3) Have Smart Greenhouse
For making greenhouses smart, IoT has facilitated weather stations to automatedly modify the climate conditions as per specific sets of instructions. Implementation of IoT in Greenhouses has removed the human interventions, thus enabling the complete process to be affordable and boost accuracy levels at the same time. With the use of solar-powered IoT sensors, you can create modern and cost-effective greenhouses.
These sensors gather and transmit the data in real-time, which assists in monitoring the greenhouse state accurately. With the assistance of the sensors, the water consumption and greenhouse state can be tracked through emails and SMS alerts. Automated and intelligent irrigation is carried out with the enablement of IoT. These sensors assist in offering information on the pressure, temperature and humidity as well as light levels.
4) Extract Data Analytics
The usual database system does not have sufficient storage for the data gathered from the IoT sensors. So, cloud-based data storage and a comprehensive IoT Platform plays a significant role in the smart agriculture system. All these systems play an imperative role such that enhanced activities can be enabled and precisely performed.
In today’s IoT world, sensors are the prime source of gathering data on a larger scale. The data is analyzed and transferred to significant information utilizing analytics software tools – the data analytics assists in the analysis of weather scenarios, livestock conditions as well as crop conditions. The data gathered leverages technological innovations and thus making enhanced decisions.
With the assistance of IoT devices, you can know the synchronized status of the crops by extracting the data right from sensors. With predictive analytics tools, you can get a precise insight to make enhanced decisions which are connected to better harvesting.
The trend analysis assists the farmers to know the latest weather conditions and proper harvesting of crops. With advanced IoT tools in the Agriculture Industry, farmers can now sustain the quality of produce and land fertility, further improving the overall product volume and superior quality.
5) Advancements with Agricultural Drones
Technological enhancements have transformed and revolutionized agricultural operations. With agricultural drones, various applications can be enabled, which have brought advancements in this domain. The Ground and Aerial drones are utilized for crop health assessment, crop tracking and monitoring, planting, crop spraying, and complete field analysis.
With precise strategy and planning based on real-time data, drone technology has offered a high rise and renovation to the agriculture industry. Drones with multispectral sensors can easily find the areas that need alterations in irrigation. Once the crops initiate growing, sensors signify their health and compute their vegetation index. In due course, smart drones have condensed the environmental impact. The outcomes have been such that there has been a considerable reduction and much lower chemical attainment in the groundwater.
What Ways IoT Technology can Enable and Transform Agriculture?
Efficient Scaling
This is made achievable through process automation. Numerous processes across the production cycle, like fertilization, pest control, or irrigation, can be effectively automated with the utilization of smart devices. And with necessary measures, agricultural capacity can be enhanced.
Improved Quality
An explicit kind of IoT product that facilitates precision farming is crop management devices. For better results, they can be placed in the field for gathering information specific to crop farming, which makes it simpler to prevent the diseases that may end up disturbing crop yield.
Be in Complete Control
Integrating IoT technology enables us to sustain and maintain control over all types of processes, and this way, production risks can be reduced. Being able to forecast the output of your production will be accommodating in planning for superior product distribution. Like, when the farmers are alert to how much crop they would be harvesting, they can make sure that their product doesn’t go unconsumed or unsold.
Manage the Pricing and Costs
Better control over the agriculture production leads to compact waste levels and enables to handle the costs and pricing better. Right with the capability to have an insight into any wrongdoings in the overall rate of the crop growth of livestock health, IoT assists in mitigating the risk levels of diminished yield or complete crop failure.
How is IoT Integrated in Agriculture?
We saw IoT use cases for smart farming and modern agriculture. While developing an IoT solution for agricultural and farming purposes, it gets significant to select sensors for the device. This, in due course, relies on the category of information that you are exploring to gather and what you desire to do with the accumulated data. So, it should be ensured that the sensors’ quality is best as that is essential for the success of your built IoT solution. After all, success relies on gathered data’s precision and consistency.
Key Takeaways
In this blog post, we saw how IoT could be used in agriculture and the benefits of IoT applications in modern agriculture and farming. IoT enabled agriculture has assisted in allowing and implementing modern technological solutions to time tested acquaintance. This has lent a hand to bridge the gap amid production, quality, and quantity yields.
Data ingested by getting and importing information from the numerous sensors for real-time applications or storage in a database makes sure fast action and less effect on the crops. With flawless, comprehensive intelligent operations and enhanced business process execution, produce gets processed swifter and reaches supermarkets in the quickest time possible.
