The Internet of the Things (IoT) is gaining importance in the infrastructure, automotive, smart home, logistics, retail as well as in Agri-Business. What is not so commonly talked about is the IoT’s most important use case yet - Precision Agriculture. With the food crisis the Earth is at risk of entering, these new technological innovations will be immensely helpful to increase crop yields, which could be life-saving.
What is Precision Agriculture?
Both the small and large-scale agricultural businesses may implement precision agriculture.
The technology consists of various sensors, aerial devices, stationary IoT solutions for precision agriculture, and so on.
The objectives of precision agriculture have expanded as well:
Increasing the farm’s economic and environmental sustainability.
Predicting climate changes and reacting to them proactively.
Choosing suitable crops with higher yields and better markets.
Measure the performance of the field by automatically capturing relevant data.
Advantages of Precision Farming in Agriculture
As for now, farmers are coming to recognize the advantages brought by precision farming using IoT. Agri-Business owners see incorporating technology into crop and cattle management as a way to improve the quality of decision-making, the return on investment (ROI), as well as the overall site security.
" IoT for precision agriculture improves the farm, field, and cattle monitoring; risk management; and planning."
If farmers use sensors to monitor the field, they’ll be getting long-term access to real-time data. This way, a site manager will be able to distinguish patterns and predict changes, potential risks, and yields, both through harvest and the growing season.
To protect the field from crop-damaging insects, farmers tend to go overboard with their nitrogen usage. Apart from reducing the environmental sustainability of the site, using chemicals is expensive. With precision agriculture, a farmer will be able to administer chemicals only when needed and protect crops more efficiently.
Modern Technologies in Agriculture IoT
Following are the technologies that are effective for precision farming using IoT: -
Sensors. They have the capacity to detect a range of biomolecular, chemical, optical, thermal, electrical, radiation, and biological metrics to get a 360-degree view on the health of crops. By mounting health monitoring sensors on animals, farmers can track the state of livestock in real time.
Precision farming software. Controller tools are widely used in precision agriculture technology. IoT improves software maintenance (e.g. automatic equipment updates) and introduces new solutions for farm management (managing a safe-driving tractor remotely via a controller). The capacity of modern precision agriculture and IoT allows controlling the equipment units simultaneously.
Connectivity protocols. While a fair share of network protocols work efficiently on short rangers (Wi-Fi), it’s the long-range ones that are the most beneficial for precision agriculture. The most widely used connectivity protocols used by intelligent farming are cellular connection, LoRaWAN, LPWAN, and a few others.
Location monitoring tools. Satellites are widely used to estimate the amount of water in the soil, crop biomass, and many other metrics. The data collected by connected GPS satellites or a location monitoring solution is then used by crop insurance companies, governments, scientists, policymakers, and commodity bodies.
Conclusion
Precision agriculture is an approach to farming that employs data sensors, connected devices, remote control tools, and other advanced technologies to give farmers more control over the field and the team.
If you are working on an IoT project and looking for technical support, contact Agilytics. At Agilytics, we design and develop software of any complexity and scale and help small and large businesses integrate innovative technologies, evolve and win the market.
Write to us at bd@agilytics.in for collaboration.