Smart Farming

Dear Reader,  

Smart farming can be referred to as the 4.0 green revolution in the field of agriculture combining agriculture methodologies with technology — Sensors & Actuators, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Internet of Things (IoT), Robotics and Drones to achieve desired efficiencies of production which are sustainable.

According to a survey, 80% of farmers in US and 24% farmers in UK have already started using Smart Farming Tool (SFT). These numbers are cognizant of the fact that SFTs are adding value to the farming ecosystem. As far as the scale of operations is considered, Smart farming tools and techniques can be applied to large scale and  on the other hand distributed conventional farming can be applied to focused small farming set of organic farms.

Through remote sensing,  smart farming system reduces waste, improves productivity and enables optimum resource management. For the benefit of micro farming, multiple crops are grown simultaneously on remote lands which require different care, manure, soil and water. By linking local sensors to smart irrigation and control, things like sensing pH balance of the soil, gauging local temperature is now possible through remote monitoring and sensing rather than walking the field all the time. This leads to increase in the yield as farmers can save on time and focus on the real issues of farming — pest control, irrigation and amending  soil conditions  all  using  sensing  and  automation.

Companies like Robotics Plus, a startup with USD 10 million  funding from Yamaha is planning to deploy its fruit plucking robots into production, while Ecorobotix with their Weed Zapping Robots have gained considerable momentum owing to the growth in Smart farming techniques.

Precision farming system has a lot of dependency on the software management systems. Control systems manage sensory input, delivering remote data for supply and decision support, as well as automation of machines . Basically, it is a standardized business approach balancing the demand and supply side with respect to resource management.

During production, it is mostly resource management from a growth and yield perspective. For instance, precision seeding uses automated tractors to reduce seed loss and seeding with proper space management between different plants. Another example is of precision water delivery.

On the demand side, it is about demand forecasting and delivering goods just in time to reduce waste.

India has always been an agrarian state, and traditional farming methods are manual and too labour intensive. Smart Farming can also provide great benefits in terms of environmental issues, for example, through more efficient use of water and optimisation of  treatments and inputs

Credits : Akhil Handa Clint James