Smart farming applications Limited natural resources and competition have put pressure on farmers to maximize productivity from the available farming facilities. Across the globe, they are facing water shortages, limited land availability, and fluctuating resource costs.
Technologists in agriculture are advising farmers & growers to adopt innovative smart farming solutions to overcome these challenges. These smart farming IoT solutions allow farmers to use sensors, gateways, and monitoring systems to collect and analyse data and make informed decisions.
Different environment-friendly specific solutions within smart farming are available for farmers. These solutions will bring the right information and more control into agriculture to take informed decisions quickly.
Following are a few examples.
Battery-powered floor sensors collect information about the nitrogen content of the soil and report it regularly.
Sensors for Irrigation: The irrigation sensors will measure the water level and automatically inform the irrigation system and sprinkler system.
Sensors before flooding: It will monitor the water level and can send the instruction to shut off the valves automatically. This application will prevent over-watering the plants, save water, and while also sending a warning message to the farmer.
Sensors to find out required fertilisers: Farmers can collect data on fertilisers and pesticides requirements, needed for their fields and optimize their resources.
Sensors can detect the weather conditions: This is from moisture to frost, which could damage sensitive plants, and automatically alert the user instantly and save crops.
Smart farming applications helps farers their cultivation more productive: It result in higher yields and better harvest quality, while higher efficiency makes production more sustainable. From the above examples, fewer pesticides and fertilisers are used, and that leads to cost savings. Fewer resources, such as electricity, water are used, again cost savings. Farmers can now have better visibility in their farm produce in process, forecast the production schedules and take advantage of the time to market.
Use Case: Oranges meets IoT
For the fruit sector, for example, there is a use case for Oranges in India. It examines how IoT technologies can improve cultivation, processing, sales and logistics. These include weather stations and thermal cameras that work with sensors, early warning systems to control pests or diseases that allow variable pesticide use and selective harvesting, food traceability technologies such as RFID or barcodes, and smart packaging process.
The project has taken farmers expectations to some extent, and they are directly involved as end-users User acceptance should be checked, especially regarding issues such as security, privacy, liability and user needs. However, there will be hurdles before farmers use the technologies. Unlike in India, in the case of Australian Orange farmers, it is a problem that they often cultivate in large fields that are not close to each other. So, to cut costs, it would be useful to share IoT technologies with neighboring field farmers.
WeMakeIoT
Our team is in the process of developing different solutions for farm owners & green-house owners in the areas of farm productivity and resource optimization.
After assessing the local environment and your specific farming ecosystem, the team at WeMakeIoT can provide the right solution to attain your specific requirements and expectations from your farm.
This is the time to invest in smart farming or to build an IoT solution for farm and greenhouse. So dive right in.
To receive professional consultation from our experts, get in touch with us via– info@wemakeiot or log on to www.wemakeiot.com to connect.