IoT as a key element of precision agriculture
According to the Cleantech’s report “Agriculture Gets Smart: The Rise of Data and Electronics”, agriculture is on the way to bringing innovations to farms for improving efficiency and maximizing profits by using data analytics. It will revolutionize the farming industry by increasing crop yields and revenue through implementation of precision agriculture techniques.
Nowadays, old-fashioned agriculture must change to satisfy a growing demand for food for the next several decades. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the world will need 70% more food, to feed a global population of 9.6 billion in 2050, and must achieve this through improvements in the way people produce and consume. Besides, agricultural production should reduce it’s impact on climate, ecosystems, and water.
We may find a solution to the growing food demand in the Beecham Research report Towards Smart Farming. It says that:
In order to counter these challenges, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) recommends that all farming sectors should be equipped with innovative tools and techniques, particularly digital technologies.
To achieve that, agricultural companies already use precision agriculture analytics based on collecting real time data from different IoT applications, like yield monitoring by drones, connected agricultural equipment and, of course, a growing number of smart sensors.
Considering that, Business Insider in The Internet of Things Report 2015 estimates that installations of IoT devices for agricultural purposes will increase from 30 million in 2015 to 75 million in 2020.
Below, we have outlined some of IoT solutions in precision agriculture that will help farmers to improve their efficiency.
One of the biggest agricultural machinery manufacturer, John Deere connects its tractors to the Internet to display data about farmers’ crop yields. Another big producer of the machinery equipment, Chase, has recently presented the concept of Case IH — a self-driving tractor that would free up farmers to perform other tasks and further increase efficiency.
Drones and satellite imagery tools are used to inspect current farmland and generate data about their crops. The French drone maker, Parrot, offers farmers a multispectral sensor Sequoia that analyses crops’ vitality by capturing the amount of light they absorb and reflect to help with decision-making processes.
On the dairy cattle front, sensors are used to monitor animal health, pregnancy detection, and birthing times. One such solution from the Netherlands is Connecterra, a dairy activity monitor that provides multiple behavior detection and predictions including animal heat and estrus cycles, health analysis and location tracking. This allows dairy farmers to free up labor time, improve production per animal and save significant amounts of money by optimizing their breeding cycles.
There are many IoT solutions that deploy sensors in soil to track moisture, current acidity levels, temperature, and other variables that help farmers increase their crop yields. The US company CropX has developed easy to install wireless sensors for monitoring the soil moisture level with adaptive irrigation that delivers crop yield increase, water and energy cost savings.
Another approach has an Israeli company, Phytech, that gathers data directly from plants themselves. Phytech’s sensors directly monitor plant’s vital signs and aggregate data about moisture in the soil, local weather conditions, and the exact amount of water being delivered by the irrigation system. This solution helps farmers in making better day to day decisions, leading to higher yield and optimal quality, empowering them through knowledge sharing with their entire network.
Telecom companies, such as Deutsche Telekom (DT), are also engaged in precision agriculture. In 2015, DT has presented its agricultural IoT applications at the Agritechnica Trade Fair, including real-time control of agricultural machinery and intelligent solutions for premises surveillance and automation.
In the USA, AT&T supplies the agriculture machinery vendor John Deere with cellular modems in agricultural machinery such as tractors and harvesters. Another US telecom, Verizon worked with Digi International on deploying M2M solution for monitoring and controlling manure to Heartland Farm Service in Illinois.
In Spain, Telefonica together with ABB has implemented automated irrigation system by connecting hydraulic valves, meters, level meters and tamper detectors using GPRS, so that farmers can now use their computers or mobile phones to set up an irrigation schedule.
However, precision agriculture has a lot of challenges related to internet connectivity in rural area. Agricultural connected devices are located away from cellular base stations with weak signal. Besides, IoT devices are not optimized to just occasionally transmit small amounts of data and are often too expensive. To change that, several companies like Huawei, Nokia, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom and others have been working on the new Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies that provide better network coverage, longer battery life and lower device cost.
In the next post, we will get into more details about those technologies. Stay tuned:)
