Agriculture 4.0, What Is It?

What is known as Agriculture 4.0 is nothing but the application of Digitalization processes and the evolution to Industry 4.0 within the primary sector. But, what is that exactly?

(Versión en español aquí)

The introduction of Agriculture 4.0 has produced a new term to describe those companies using this new and much more technified model: the Agritech sector. Companies in this sector are adopting new methodologies such as the Precision Agriculture. Basically, according to the European Parliament definition, it is “a farming management model based upon observing, measuring and responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops”. The goals are mainly increasing the productivity of the crops while ensuring a higher environmental sustainability.

In plain words: to produce more and better with less. And for that there are several tools, techniques and technologies.

Drones

The use of drones (unmanned aircrafts) is starting to be developed in the Agritech sector in several ways. One of their most common uses is the capture of images of the crops. These images are later analyzed with SW programs that provide information about how the crops are evolving. This way, the farmer knows, for instance, which areas need to be watered more intensively (the analysis here is usually based on the radiation that the vegetables release or reflect in certain bands of the EM spectrum), where there are more weeds to remove, or if there is presence of any plague. Companies such as Aerial Insights, from Spain, offer this kind of analysis over photographs as part of their business.

Less commonly but also possible, companies are using drones as remote fertilizing vehicles. By boarding fertilizers on the aircrafts and defining the route it will have to follow, they can fertilize specific areas of the farm, or even individual plants.

And not only farmers, but also public administrations are beginning to use drones in the farming. These aircrafts are a very good alternative to make the control tasks for the public grants given to farmers, which usually depend on the extension of the farmland and the number of plants that are eligible for a grant (such as the olive tree in Europe). The tasks to control these grants has been traditionally done by taking pictures from regular aircrafts.

Internet of Things

The Agritech sector is considered as one of the areas with bigger growth potential within the Internet of Things (IoT) industry. Deploying IoT devices in farmlands capable of remotely sending data related with the crops opens a whole new world of possibilities.

These devices may include a number of sensors that measure several parameters affecting the evolution of the crops, such as the soil moisture, the temperature or the electrical conductivity of the ground. All this data allow a real time monitoring of the status of the crops as well as, through statistical models, predicting when watering or fertilizing on certain areas are going to be needed.

AgroAir, for instance, is a good example of a company providing this kind of services. We, at Barbara, are partnered with them to make IoT deployments in farmlands in Spain.

The next step is to include not only sensors but also actuators as part of IoT deployments. By establishing rules that execute actions under certain events, it would be possible, for example, to automatically enable watering in a specific area when 3 sensors were reporting a soil moisture under 30% in the same period of time.

Blockchain

If there is one technology that is currently on everyone’s lips, that is Blockchain. We constantly hear and read about new use cases or services claiming to be based on this technology. Agriculture, or more broadly, the food industry, couldn’t be less and we are starting to see some initiatives and ideas around Blockchain.

One of these initiatives is related to ensuring the origin of the food. The supply chain from the moment the “raw material” (fruit, cereals… etc) is planted and harvested in a farmland until it’s purchased by a consumer in any format, is very long. And it’s in a scenario like this one — several actors (the elements in that chain) with a certain degree of untrustworthiness among them interacting — where Blockchain makes quite sense. By using solutions based on Smart Contracts, it would be possible to write all the transactions in a Blockchain and, therefore, ensuring the legitimacy and origin of each transaction. You could even control the treatment given to the product itself throughout the whole chain, and ensure the labelling at the point of sale is coherent. This could avoid potential frauds on the quality of the products.

New technologies have been progressively introduced in sectors that are traditionally seen as poorly technified. The Agritech sector is a good example of that. These technologies and new ones to come will be progressively becoming part of the reality of the Agriculture in our society.

Welcome to the Agriculture 4.0 era!

This post was originally published at barbaraiot.com on August 24th, 2018. If you like it and want to receive similar content subscribe to our Newsletter