Smart Farming Technology and Benefits

Crop yield is a major issue for farmers due to bad weather conditions, peasants, unplanned seed sowing, irregular irrigation, and unpredicted locust attacks. Bigger challenges for farmers include soil erosion, biodiversity losses, and rising demands for food of higher quality. Such issues usually leave farmers on the verge of settling for less and hopeless for the future. Thus, it has become a dire need for farmers to opt for technology like IoT to monitor their fields in real-time and prioritize quality food production.

Globally, IoT in the agriculture market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 14.7 percent by 2025. With the increasing population, the demand for food is also rising considerably, which necessitates the adoption of IoT technology in the industry for effective results. The technology is a full-fledged package, including all the possible requirements in the agricultural sector. It involves accurate weather predictions along with real-time alerts, so that farm managers know what is going on in the fields even when they are not present physically. There are many other reasons to include smart farming solutions in the agricultural sector – it is one of the best choices for farmers to simplify and automate their functioning. Here are the top reasons why including a smart farming solution is better in the agricultural domain.

What is a Smart Farming Solution and its Contribution to Crop Health Management?

IoT technology implemented with the traditional agricultural concepts results in smart farming. The technological era is enabling modernization in the agriculture sector and contributes to a wholly transformed process. An IoT-enabled smart farming solution has built-in sensors that extract data from the fields, crops, and other farming assets. This data plays a major role in re-building essentials in the farming sector like crop health analysis, real-time field monitoring, weather predictions, smart pest management, and inventory analysis, among others.

Smart Farming Solution is entirely based on automation through sensor devices and gateway connectivity, which helps the managers to analyze their decisions and make the most of their intelligence. As the sensors are installed on the fields or farms, they extract relevant information like moisture content, temperature, and humidity, and then cumulate the fundamental aspects to predict the quality of the land to gain better crop yield.

How Does it Work?

The smart farming solution operates through a data-driven approach via sensors, where the data is turned into user-friendly information, enabling the managers to make quicker and wiser decisions related to their farm business. For instance, if the farm manager wants to allocate specific irrigation timings to his/her field, the IoT solution facilitates the threshold selection and automates the entire process of irrigating the fields unless the settings are changed. Apart from automating the irrigation process, the managers can also have a transparent display of the field activities on their connected gadgets to monitor in real-time.

 Essential Features of a Smart Farming Solution

• Livestock Tracking and Geofencing
• Smart Logistics
• Smart Pest Management
• Accurate Weather Predictability
• Predictive Analysis for Crops
• Remote Monitoring
• Sensor-based Field and Resource Mapping
• Intelligent Irrigation System
• Drone Monitoring
• Stats on Livestock Feeding
• Smart Greenhouses

Benefits of Implementing the Smart Solution in Farms

Remote Management

With farms being located in far-off areas and distant lands, farmers are seeking a better solution to their management issues. IoT technology provides a smart farming solution, enabling farmers to manage their fields remotely via smart gadgets. Also, farm managers require proper visibility of their fields despite poor health, weather conditions, travel limitations, or labor shortages. Remote management through smart technology provides transparency and real-time crop monitoring, which results in better yield.

Real-Time Crop Monitoring

Many places include indigenous methods of farming mainly due to a lack of proper knowledge among the farmers. Presently, the agricultural state has become more critical and involves complex operations related to weather forecasting and soil quality checks. Such a situation calls for a newer vision in agriculture, where there is real-time monitoring with the use of sensors. Such devices play a significant role in providing accurate results, impacting directly to better crop yield.

Crop Protection

The Internet of Things technology uses a data-driven approach and enables farm managers with modern techniques to keep a detailed check on their crops. It helps the farmers take appropriate actions against unwanted pests and protect their crops from various diseases. Also, the smart farming solution keeps an eye on every activity of crop production, which triggers instant alerts about its health, condition, and temperature requirement, and displays all the details on the interconnected smart gadgets.

Soil Testing & its Quality

The IoT-based sensors are fixed under the ground to monitor soil quality and test its potential for different crops. This enhances how the farming sector works, providing the best solutions to gain error-free results. The advancing technology provides a complete package to analyze the soil quality and suggest farming options to the farmers. Such processes come under precision agriculture, enabling smart measures to improve farming efficiency in all aspects.

Real-time Analysis of Soil Demand

The Internet of Things provides precision technology for more sustainable and productive farming processes. Accurate soil data is one of the most valuable resources for farmers to grow quality crops. Also, IoT facilitates the farmers with advanced techniques on sowing the seeds along with informative insights on the weather forecast, required water content in the soil, appropriate temperature, and humidity. All this is performed in real-time and analyzed to ensure farm productivity.

Smart Greenhouses

Smart greenhouses involve IoT techniques and use connected devices to create an automatically regulated environment for crop production. Such an environment reduces the weather challenges and risk of predators intruding in the fields, thus protecting the crops at all costs. The automatic feature of smart greenhouses delivers real-time insights to the farmers and contributes to delivering optimum efficiency. Moreover, it is equipped with advanced sensors, gateway connectivity, and an easily operable dashboard for regular insights on irrigation, lighting, humidity, temperature, and real-time updates on different crop activities.

IoT technology is leading the way in the farming sector with its ability to provide accurate data on crops. It is further projected that nearly 12 million agricultural sensors will be installed globally by 2023, which reflects that an average field could generate approximately half a million data points every day. This is the future of farming with IoT that will improve crop yields and increase profitability. Also, IoT technology’s inclusion enables farmers to simplify their workload through automated processing. IoT mainly helps to analyze and optimize big data in agriculture, maximizing operational efficiency and minimizing labor costs.