Digital Technology has been causing massive
transformation in several sectors of the world making life activities much
easier with some sophistication. However, Agriculture is one of the major
sectors of the world have enjoyed terrific improvements from these beautiful
technologies. A concept is known as Smart
farming is used to describe the application of digital technology to
agriculture thus we shall look at what this concept entails and how it works
here.
To start with, let’s find out what smart farming is;
WHAT
IS SMART FARMING?
Smart farming simply means the use of digital
technologies to carry out farming operations in a much accurate and precise way
thereby increasing the quality and quantity of yield. It’s data-driven
combining and integrating all necessary data into a single system that helps in
making informed decisions and activities on the farm. Smart farming uses
technologies like the Internet of Things, Software applications, Sensing, Communication
and Positioning systems to collect and process farm data for efficient farm
management.
Now let’s take a look at the applications of these
technologies;
Internet
of Things, IoT: is hardware and software systems enabled
solutions to farming that collect and processed farm data that allowed for precision.
IoT is all about farm data-big data and it’s the driving force of smart farming.
Let’s see how IoT is applied to Agriculture;
Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle, Drones: IoT has led to the development of
agricultural drones for farmers. Drones can help carry out crop and livestock
health assessment, fertilizer and chemical applications on crops and collection
of data like plant counting, plant height measurement, yield predictions among
others on the farm. Drones usage on-farm has been found to improve the efficient use of
farm inputs accurately thereby reducing cost and wastage.
Precision
Agriculture: IoT techniques have made agriculture
more controlled and accurate thereby leading to efficient operations and
optimal production. In simple terms, we can refer to Precision Agriculture as
farming that makes efficient use of inputs resulting in reduced cost, increased
yields and revenues on the farm. It entails giving the right quantity of treatments
to crops or livestock at the right time with great accuracy. For instance, a
maize farm can be supplied with the right volume of irrigation water it needed
during the dry season with Precision Agriculture.
Greenhouse
Automation: IoT techniques can help monitor and control the
environmental and nutrient conditions of greenhouse plants thereby resulting in
automatic interventions in the greenhouse. This leads to efficient management
of Greenhouse that improves the production level.
Software
Application: software packages for mobile and desktop
have been developed to give specific solutions to certain farm types. These
packages supply farmers with first-hand information like pest attack warning,
the weather forecast, marketing data, extension services among others that can help
make an informed decision on the farm.
Remote Sensing: it is the gathering of information about
objects or areas in the real-world without having physical contact with the object
or area directly. It is a tool to measure and monitor the world’s resources using
spatial technology with higher precision and accuracy. Having many applications
in agriculture and also constitutes a major part of precision agriculture. Some
of its applications are in soil mapping, estimation of expected yield from a
crop field, monitoring and measuring of soil nutrient and water status, pest
and disease infestation identification, crop damage, performance and stress
assessment among others.
Positioning
System: this is the use of a GPS tracking system to collect
information on a particular location of farmland or pinpoint the exact location
of livestock or farm machinery. Self-driven farm machinery operate using
this system and also fitted with sensors that can help collect real-time farm
data.
MAJOR
CHALLENGES OF SMART FARMING
The major challenges being that who is the rightful
owner of these data collected from farmland, the farmer or the smart
farming tool providers. This has raised a lot of issues needing the government
to create a property right law that can monitor how these data can be used and also specify the data ownership. In addition to this, the relatively high cost of adoption of these technologies in developing countries especially, African countries, has mitigated against its use by individual farmers. However, for this technology to be efficient use, there is a need for joint or cooperate ownership of these smart farming tools by farmers.
To conclude, Smart Farming is an
evolving, wide and complex area of agriculture that we can’t cover all of it in
a single blog post. What we have here is just an overview of what Smart Farming
is and a sort of introduction to the concept of smart farming. To find out more about Smart farming, you can click on the links below. Smart farming is the future
agriculture; it is easy farming and also a reliable and sustainable way to feed
the world's growing population… Thank you, see you next week.
Tags: Remote sensing in agriculture/ Smart farming-sciforce/Precision Agriculture/Digital Agriculture
المشاركات
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق