10 Apr What is The Internet of Agriculture (IoA)?
The Internet of Agriculture (IoA) and The Internet of Farming (IoF)
We’ve all heard about the Internet of Things, IIOT, Industry 4.0 but what about agriculture and farming?
IoTech understand that over the next 30 years there’s going to be a significant population boom of an estimated 2 billion additional people globally which adds increased pressure on producing more food from the same area of arable land that we have today.
That holds a whole host of challenges that technology can help with exponentially when it comes to dramatically increasing yields. Farmers are coming under current and future pressures to reduce pricing yet increase productivity so need to find ways of mitigating that risk.
Farming has undergone a number of technological changes in the past few decades which have benefited hugely from the adaptation of smart agricultural devices.
By embracing the latest technologies farmers have gained more control over the productivity of their land enabling predictable growth of both livestock and crops. The days of pulling ploughs behind horses and taking a sickle to the crops are written in history whilst modern smart farming devices have taken over.
The internet of Farming is here to stay!
Next we explore areas in which The Internet of Farming / Internet of Agriculture have taken hold and their benefits:
- Self-driving Tractors
- Reduce workload & stress on employees
- Automated planting systems
- Working both day and night
- Guidance systems (GPS) giving accurate information in any condition
- Precision, digitalised farming
- Precision location methods
- Geo-location services
- Precision sensing & identification
- Smart Topography
- Drones
- Precision crop dusting and spraying
- Remote access in hard to reach areas or fields
- Rapid response times to crop infestations
- Soil and field analysis
- Health assessment using infrared light checking for infestation
- Satellite Imagery
- Checking for soil condition
- IoT Apps for analysing
- Checking hectares of land in seconds for health conditions using large scale imagery
- Automated farming equipment
- Tag systems for livestock offering real-time monitoring
- Weather stations offering app based updates
- Precision sprayers only concentrating on land requires spraying saving farmers money
- Tracking devices for all agricultural machinery via the cloud offering status, location & mobile alerts for unauthorised movements
- Smart Vertical Racks
- Reducing carbon footprint
- Hydroponic greenhouses (without the need for soil)
- Minimising overheads
- Low water use (up to 70% less)
- Sensors
- Soil Moisture sensors
- Temperature sensors both in and above ground
- Liquid level sensors monitoring flooding
The list goes on! There’s a whole plethora of smart devices not listed above that make full use of IoT – if IoTech were to name them all you’d be reading the list for hours on end.
Whilst there has been much ambiguity about smart devices being used in agriculture let’s explore the reasons for their necessity.
As of from 2018 37% of our planet is used for agriculture. It’s predicted that IoT device installations will hit 80 million by 2020, growing 20% annually whilst smart agricultural devices is likely to treble to $15.5 billion by 2025 in comparison to $5 billion back in 2016.
With the introduction of 5G The Internet of Farming, Internet of Agriculture and IoT in general offer technical advances that are likely to affect us all at some stage if not already. You can read more about 5G in the following article https://www.iotech.co.uk/news/5g-the-internet-of-things/
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