The agriculture industry is one of the most essential elements of civilization. Agriculture provides food and natural byproducts to humans around the planet and economically supports about 25% of the world's population. However, agricultural production is now being challenged to produce more output with fewer resources as the world expands. This article examines how the Internet of Things can optimize agricultural output, reduce resource consumption, and even help reduce carbon emissions.
Smart Farming Technologies
While agriculture has existed for longer than recorded history, its methods went unchanged until the industrial revolution. For several millennia, farming consisted of large spans of land, natural sunlight, natural and artificial irrigation, and natural predators. Over the last few centuries, humans have been able to increase and optimize the output of traditional, old-school farming by increasing land size, utilizing more complex irrigation technology, and reduce predation with pesticides. However, the long-term impacts of this methodology are becoming increasingly taxing on ecological and human health.
Luckily for our planet, the Internet of Things has helped the agriculture industry make massive strides towards the future of smart agriculture. Companies such as John Deere, a global agriculture equipment manufacturer, are developing smart farming precision agriculture technology that gathers data to help farmers make more informed decisions and reduce resource consumption. For example, their IoT-enabled guidance systems can guide their large-scale tractors with an accuracy of +/- 6 inches, thereby reducing the number of harvesting passes through a field.
Impressively, John Deere has also developed See and Spray™ technology that utilizes AI image detection to identify unwanted plants in a field and target herbicides to only the unwanted plants, as opposed to spraying the entire field with herbicides. This new technology takes a conscious, precise approach to pest mitigation. As a result, resource consumption is reduced, as is the unnecessary use of potentially hazardous chemicals.
Other companies, such as DJI Agriculture, are creating new, advanced data collection solutions that can help keep agriculture professionals informed about their resources on a small and large scale. For example, DJI offers state-of-the-art, drone-powered multispectral analysis products that can detect key performance indicators in the soil, such as moisture, temperature, and vegetation location, and allow farmers to identify and target problems in an exact location.
Additionally, DJI is taking a new, targeted approach to fertilizer distribution. By implementing agricultural IoT drone technology, they can map a farm's critical resources, identify automated flight paths of the drone, and distribute fertilizer in exact locations while achieving better-than-human distribution.
As one of the largest IoT-powered sub-industries in agriculture, soil monitoring technologies provide real-time, large-scale soil metric data to farmers. This allows them to fertilize and irrigate their farms more accurately to increase efficiency and reduce resource consumption.
Smart farming technologies are booming, and new exciting IoT farming technologies are cropping up (pun intended) every day. The IoT Agriculture and Smart Farming market is expected to exceed 23 billion dollars by 2022.
Vertical Farming
Even given the massive strides in traditional agriculture methodology, modern-day outdoor agriculture still has its pitfalls. Currently, the agriculture industry is responsible for 1/5th of all greenhouse emissions and 70% of global freshwater consumption.
The use of synthetic fertilizers has known negative impacts on biodiversity and human health, and the production of synthetic fertilizers accounts for 50% of the energy consumption within the agriculture industry. However, some agricultural pioneers are changing how agriculture can be done.
Technologies such as aquaponics -- the combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (cultivating plants in water) are redefining how we grow food. Aquaponic farms can consume 95% less water while using zero pesticides, as the need for pest management can be mitigated by taking farming indoors. Additionally, aquaponic farms can be implemented vertically, increasing the productivity per square foot by orders of magnitude more than traditional farming.
However, these closed systems require robust and complex monitoring systems to ensure that nutrient levels are safe and accurate for fish and plants. Additionally, these systems often monitor and control the light wavelengths to which plants are exposed to regulate plant health and growth.
Vertical aquaponic farms utilize less water, use no pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, and don't require the use of carbon-emitting equipment, making them a potential alternative to the traditional farming of many staple crops globally.
IoT in Agriculture
Smart farming has rapidly grown to be a global industry. It has been accomplished by implementing agriculture-geared IoT technology, such as smart-farming communication networks, dedicated sensor networks, agriculture-geared monitoring systems, and more.
Agricultural IoT makes machines smarter, gives more data to farmers, and enables fundamental changes to how farms work. It's no doubt that smart farming will only get smarter, and the Internet of Farm-Things will continue to grow.
Article Contribution By: Zach Wendt