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Smart farming using IoT : The future of IoT

Writer's picture: LearnElectronics IndiaLearnElectronics India

Updated: Sep 29, 2024



  • According to the UN, the current population around the world is more than 7.8 Billion as of April 2020.

  • The experts have predicted that the population would rise more and may reach 9.7 Billion by 2050.

  • The food-producing rate hence should be increased by almost 70% compared to the current decade’s production rate.


Increasing agriculture demand with increase of population


  • This amount of humans to be fed in the future is impossible with current agricultural techniques but thanks to IoT (Internet of Things) being adopted in agriculture, which has now made the statement “is impossible” to “was impossible”.

  • The global smart agriculture market size was $5 billion in 2016 and is estimated to rise more by 2025 to triple the numbers i.e. $15 billion.

  • As predicted by BI Intelligence experts, IOT agriculture products would grow annually by 20% and may reach around 75 million by 2020.

What is Smart Farming?


#SmartFarming or #SmartAgriculture are the terms used to define the implementation of IoT(Internet of Things) technology in the farming process and eventually make farming easy, productive, and more efficient. Likewise, the implementation of IoT in home and city leading to the names “SmartHome” & “SmartCity”. Smart farming is the future of agriculture.

This will make the process of farming smarter and will reduce labor work in the field.


How IoT play a role in smart farming?


The role of IoT in Smart Farming is like the “Lord Rama in the story - Ramayana”. Similarly, the farming process cannot be made smart by using #IoT technology, and to simply understand that, let’s see an example and consider the image below:


IOT


Using IoT the farmer has connected various devices or things to his/her mobile. The processes the farmer can do with it are:


  • Can control the tractor using #mobile.

  • Check human detection using sensors and know about the same on mobile.

  • Control the irrigation system.

  • See the live feed of the farm through the drone.

  • #Monitor the soil.

  • Check for rain, temperature, and many more.

These activities can simply be achieved by just sitting at home and almost doing no hard work. This is how IoT makes the process of farming easy and thus plays an important role.


To know more about IoT Click here.




Smart Farming Technologies


Adopting to Smart Farming System have many benefits but what exactly are the technologies involved in the process to make Farming be said as “Smart Farming”:


Hardware

Hardware is the soul of any IoT-based agriculture monitoring system because it makes the sensors/electronics, which ease the farming process, into smart devices and help monitor agriculture. These hardware devices used are:

  • Sensors - These can be said the eyes, nose, and mouth of an IoT technology which are used to sense the nearby environment in different ways and provide the inputs to the Brain of the hardware. Some examples of sensors are soil & moisture sensors, temperature, humidity, rain sensor, fire sensor, motion sensor, etc.

  • Actuators - After sensors send the value to the brain, depending on some applications the hardware is supposed to do some action after receiving that input. The sending back of data by the brain of the hardware is called output and that output is received by electronics known as Actuators. Some actuators used are motors, lights, electric sprinklers, etc.

  • Brain - The brain of the hardware is the electronics that control all the other connected hardware with it. The brain can be a microcontroller or a processor that can control other components working using computer programming.

  • Communication - Some or maybe all the Smart Agriculture applications have wireless connectivity using which the farmer can check the status of things and control various operations on the farm. This communication is possible by using technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G, etc.


Software

This is the computer programming technology that provides the brain with various commands to control electronics, receive or send data, and do more. The programming has to be done specifically based on the application for better results.


  • Cloud Technology - #cloud is one the most important technology used in this decade, #cloud services are provided by top companies like Amazon (AWS), Google (GCP), Microsoft(Azure), and many more. The data from the #sensors & electronics are stored on the cloud and can be checked by a human or