The Top 5 Ways IoT Enables Smart Farming

Using modern technology is a must if agriculture production is to increase by 70% by 2050 to feed the global population of a predicted 9.1 billion people. So, let’s explore how farming can benefit from automation using sensors and IoT to become more efficient. That's where smart farming comes in. 

What is Smart Farming?

A broad definition would describe it as applying modern technologies in agriculture. It’s using equipment like IoT sensors, geo-positioning systems, drones, and robots to increase a farm’s overall efficiency.

Smart farming also leverages the collection and analysis of (big) data to better utilize the available resources. Technology helps farmers make informed decisions about when to plant, irrigate, or harvest the crops and understand what’s happening in their fields and greenhouses in real-time.

Together, this data helps farmers achieve safer, sustainable food products and more cost-effective farming practices. And that’s precisely the goal of this concept. Now that we understand what smart farming is let’s look at the five most important applications of IoT in agriculture.

1. Crop Monitoring

Understanding what’s happening in the field has always been essential for a good harvest. But historically, this has always been one of the more demanding activities, requiring someone to be present on every piece of land where the farmers tried to grow. Not anymore.

Today, IoT sensors in the soil and cameras around the fields gather all this information automatically and in real-time. Farmers can then track soil conditions and react instantly to the plants’ nutritional requirements. IoT technology also helps track weather conditions, like recent precipitation in specific areas, real-time soil moisture, the daily amount of sunlight received, etc.

The sooner farmers know about any issue, the sooner they can react. And the sooner they react, the less damage to the overall yield or the lower the extra costs. All these little things ultimately add up, especially with crops like wheat, where economy of scale plays a huge part because the farmers who can supply the cheapest products will be selling them en masse.

2. Precision Farming

Technology has the ability to make agriculture way more precise. And, of course, this is exactly what it’s been doing over the past two centuries, albeit slowly. But today, it’s on a whole new level because advanced agriculture relies on automatic irrigation and feeding, GPS asset tracking, satellite field imagining and analysis, targeted crop fertilization, etc. Combining real-time data with the exact knowledge from past years’ weather conditions, such as temperature, precipitation, sunlight, and humidity, means the farmers understand the precise seasonal weather conditions at their exact locations.

Let’s take Agrifac, the manufacturer of innovative agriculture machinery, as an example. Using Spotflow, they first gather telemetry data from sprayers in the field, and analyzing this data helps them improve their decision-making process.

Nowadays, you don’t have to rely on a not-so-informative or precise weather forecast for the general area you farm in. You simply know what’s happening in real-time, and the system shows you historical patterns for this exact day/week/month. This understanding enables you to better plan your agriculture activities – when and where to plant a certain crop; when the field will need more water for irrigation because, thanks to real-time monitoring, you know that a dry spell is coming; when to harvest the crops because the humidity is just right, etc. Knowledge is power, and data is knowledge.

3. Livestock Management

Technology for managing livestock has similar goals – improving animal welfare, increasing the quality and quantity of the produced output, be it milk or meat, and more effectively managing grazing patterns. With ear or collar location tags, farmers know where their herds are at every single moment. They also know which grasslands the animals were feeding in and fertilizing yesterday. Utilizing a bit of technology, farmers can even have certain gates open only to certain animals, leading to precise route planning and optimal pasture utilization.

Moving inside the sheds and barns, IoT technology helps with everything from feeding to milking. Farmers can set up automatic dispensers serving precisely calibrated portions to feed their livestock, delivering the right amounts at the right times and even monitoring the weight of the remaining food.

Most of the other around-farm activities can also be automated. Milking is a good example, where farmers leverage IIoT technology to gather data from their milking machines and use this data to create personalized milking routines for individual cows, reducing non-optimal milkings by a significant margin.

4. Smart Greenhouses

Temperature, humidity, and lighting are among the crucial environmental elements when maintaining ideal conditions in any greenhouse. These elements need to be continuously tracked, and the farmer has to be notified the second one of the variables moves out of its optimal range. And when it comes down to monitoring and alerting, nothing is faster, cheaper, and more precise than an automated system relying on IoT sensors and AI data analysis engines. Because without automatization, tracking so many data points continuously and reacting to changes in the measured values on time is simply impossible.

The application is very similar to the first two use cases described above, but the most significant difference is that the IoT systems can automatically adjust the monitored conditions inside the greenhouses. Once again, the farmers can monitor and maintain ideal conditions for a particular crop, speeding up its growth and boosting yields. Plus, the automatic control saves quite a lot of money in the long run – for example, the heating automatically switches on when the temperature drops below the optimal level.

5. Equipment Monitoring

Every farm relies on agricultural equipment – sprinklers, feeders, tractors, automatic gates, you name it. Therefore, it’s crucial that every farmer understands how their equipment is used. Questions like: “Is the machine online or offline? What route did my harvesters take? How long has it been working? When was the last time the machine underwent regular maintenance? How much fuel did it consume?” are best answered by automatically collecting, analyzing, and reporting the data in a dedicated industrial IoT platform.

With a dedicated IIoT platform, you can not only better understand the usage of the equipment, but you can also manage and optimize the entire fleet simply and even spot early signs of a possible failure and take remediation actions before the machine breaks down completely.

Transitioning to Digital Farms

By now, the benefits of modern technology should be quite obvious to anyone serious about agriculture, but let’s name a few:

• Increased operational efficiency
  
   
• Minimization of costs
  
   
• Boosting the quality and quantity of yields
  
   
• Reduced waste
  
   
• Improved sustainability

With automated data collection, farmers don’t rely on error-prone and costly human labor. With more precise data, farmers make better-informed plans and decisions. And with better decisions, farmers save money while increasing their income from selling their products.