The Benefits of Smart Farming: How IoT Is Shaping Agriculture
The Benefits of Smart Farming: How IoT Is Shaping Agriculture
Agrojay Innovations Pvt. Ltd.
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Technologies and IoT have the potential to transform agriculture in many aspects. Namely, there are five ways IoT can improve agriculture:
Data, tons of data, collected by smart agriculture sensors, e.g. weather conditions, soil quality, crop’s growth progress, or cattle health. This data can be used to track the state of your business in general, as well as staff performance, equipment efficiency, etc.
Better control over the internal processes and, as a result, lower 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 crops you are going to harvest, you can make sure your product won’t lie around unsold.
Increased business efficiency through process automation. By using smart devices, you can automate multiple processes across your production cycle, e.g. irrigation, fertilizing, or pest control.
Enhanced product quality and volumes. Achieve better control over the production process and maintain higher standards of crop quality and growth capacity through automation.
As a result, all of these factors can eventually lead to higher revenue
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There are many types of IoT sensors and IoT applications that can be used in agriculture:
Probably the most popular smart agriculture gadgets are weather stations, combining various smart farming sensors. Located across the field, 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 (i.e. precision farming).
In addition to sourcing environmental data, weather stations can automatically adjust the conditions to match the given parameters. Specifically, greenhouse automation systems use a similar principle.
One more type of IoT product in agriculture and another element of precision farming is crop management devices. Just like weather stations, they should be placed in the field to collect data specific to crop farming; from temperature and precipitation to leaf water potential and overall crop health, these can all be used to readily collect data and information for improved farming practices.
A more complex approach to IoT products in agriculture can be represented by the so-called farm productivity management systems. They usually include a number of agriculture IoT devices and sensors, installed on the premises as well as a powerful dashboard with analytical capabilities and in-built accounting/reporting features.
To build an IoT solution for agriculture, you need to choose the sensors for your device (or create a custom one). Your choice will depend on the types of information you want to collect and the purpose of your solution. In any case, the quality of your sensors is crucial to the success of your product— it will depend on the accuracy of the collected data and its reliability.
Data analytics should be at the core of every smart agriculture solution. The collected data itself will be of little help if you cannot make sense of it. Thus, you need to have powerful data analytics capabilities and apply predictive algorithms and machine learning in order to obtain actionable insights based on the collected data.
Maintenance of your hardware is a challenge that is of primary importance for IoT products in agriculture, as the sensors are typically used in the field and can be easily damaged. Thus, you need to make sure your hardware is durable and easy to maintain. Otherwise, you will need to replace your sensors more often than you would like.
Smart farming applications should be tailored for use in the field. A business owner or farm manager should be able to access the information on-site or remotely via a smartphone or desktop computer.
To ensure that your smart farming application performs well (and to make sure it can handle the data load), you need a solid internal infrastructure.
Cost management and waste reduction thanks to the increased control overproduction. Being able to see any anomalies in the crop growth or livestock health, you will be able to mitigate the risks of losing your yield.
Now that we have outlined how IoT can be advantageously applied in the sphere of agriculture, let’s take a look at how the listed benefits can find their application in real life.
IoT Use Cases in Agriculture :
Monitoring of Climate Conditions
Some examples of such agriculture IoT devices are all metro, Smart Elements, and Pycno.
Greenhouse Automation :
For instance, Farm app and Growlink are also IoT agriculture products offering such capabilities among others.
GreenIQ is also an interesting product that uses smart agriculture sensors. It is a smart sprinkler controller that allows you to manage your irrigation and lighting systems remotely.
Crop Management :
Thus, you can monitor your crop growth and any anomalies to effectively prevent diseases or infestations that could harm your yield. Arable and Semios can serve as good representations of how this use case can be applied in real life.
End-to-End Farm Management Systems :
This offers remote farm monitoring capabilities and allows you to streamline most of the business operations. Similar solutions are represented by FarmLogs and Cropio.
In addition to the listed IoT agriculture use cases, some prominent opportunities include vehicle tracking (or even automation), storage management, logistics, etc.
Four Things to Consider Before Developing Your Smart Farming Solution :
As we can see, the use cases for IoT in agriculture are endless. There are many ways smart devices can help you increase your farm’s performance and revenue. However, agriculture IoT apps development is no easy task. There are certain challenges you need to be aware of if you are considering investing in smart farming.
1. Hardware
2. The Brain
3. Maintenance
smart-farming-app-development
4. Mobility
Plus, each connected device should be autonomous and have enough wireless range to communicate with the other devices and send data to the central server.
5. Infrastructure
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