What Is a Smart Farm?
Smart farming is an emerging concept that refers to managing farms using technologies like IoT, robotics, drones and AI to increase the quantity and quality of products while optimizing the human labor required by production.
The technologies available for present-day farmers are:
- Sensors: soil, water, light, humidity, temperature management.
- Software: specialized software solutions that target specific farm types.
- Location: GPS, Satellite, etc.
- Robotics: Autonomous tractors, processing facilities, etc
- Data analytics: Data pipelines for downstream solutions, etc.
Armed with such tools, farmers can monitor field conditions without even going to the field and make strategic decisions for the whole farm or for a single plant. ‘The driving force of smart farming is IoT —connecting smart machines and sensors integrated on farms to make farming processes data-driven and data-enabled.
IoT Solutions to Agricultural Problems — There are two major areas of agriculture that IoT can revolutionize:
- Precision farming
- Farming automation/robotization
1. Precision Farming—Precision farming is an umbrella concept for IoT-based approaches that make farming more controlled and accurate. In simple words, plants and cattle get precisely the treatment they need, determined by machines with superhuman accuracy. By precisely measuring variations within a field, farmers can boost the effectiveness of pesticides and fertilizers, or use them selectively.
2. Precision Livestock Farming—As in the case of precision agriculture, smart farming techniques enable farmers better to monitor the needs of individual animals and to adjust their Nutrition, accordingly, thereby preventing disease and enhancing herd health. Large farm owners can use wireless IoT applications to monitor the location, well-being, and health of their cattle. With this information, they can identify sick animals, so that they can be separated from the herd to prevent the spread of disease.
Automation in Smart Greenhouses– IoT-driven smart greenhouses can intelligently monitor as well as control the climate, eliminating the need for manual intervention. Various sensors are deployed to measure the environmental parameters according to the specific requirements of the crop. That data is stored in a cloud-based platform for further processing and control with minimal manual intervention.
Agricultural Drones–Agriculture is one of the major verticals to incorporate both ground-based and aerial drones for crop health assessment, irrigation, crop monitoring, crop spraying, planting, soil and field analysis and other spheres.
IoT has fostered the belief that a smart network of sensors, actuators, cameras, robots, drones, and other connected devices will bring an unprecedented level of control and automated decision-making to agriculture, making possible an enduring ecosystem of innovation in this eldest of industries.
Third Green Revolution
Smart Farming and IoT-driven agriculture are paving the way for what can be called a Third Green Revolution. This revolution draws upon the combined application of data-driven analytics technologies, such as precision farming equipment, IoT, “big data” analytics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones), robotics, etc. In the future this smart farming revolution will depict, pesticide and fertilizer use will drop while overall efficiency will rise. IoT technologies will enable better food traceability, which in turn will lead to increased food safety. It will also be beneficial for the environment.
Therefore, smart farming has a real potential to deliver a more productive and sustainable form of agricultural production, based on a more precise and resource-efficient approach. New farms will finally realize the eternal dream of mankind. It’ll feed our population, which may explode to 9.6 billion by 2050.
WeMakeIoT specializes in leveraging IoT technology to create solutions cutting across many industries such as agriculture, utility, and services. We have successfully implemented smart farming with IOT and generated expected outcomes for our customer. From concept to build and constructing efficiency & generate results through IoT applications is one of our main areas of specializations.
Connect with us at www.wemakeiot.com to explore further options in Smart Farming With IOT.