Smart agriculture involves designing, developing, and applying an innovative method in the farming sector using information and communication technologies. IoT proves to be an early warning system for precision farming. Sensors like soil moisture and water level sensors collect the data and transmit it through a communication module. Smart agriculture applications include smart irrigation, livestock monitoring, remote crop monitoring, remote soil monitoring, and smart warehouse, etc. Remote sensing, geographic information systems and artificial intelligence like technologies will be a more significant asset for increasing crop productivity and will ease the efforts of the farmers. This chapter discusses about various applications of smart agriculture.
Top1. Introduction
The internet of things (IoT) is the technology where sensors collect data with or without human intervention. The sensors are connected via the internet to achieve enhanced results. It possesses various technologies like global positioning system (GPS), radio frequency identification (RFID), etc. Raspberry pi, Beagle Bone Blackboard, and the most popular Arduino board do the processing fastly. IoT's prime objective is collecting and sharing the data with the stakeholders. The sensors may have fixed locations or be mobile, but data is gathered and transmitted to adjacent devices or systems. Wi-Fi or Ethernet provides internet connectivity to the sensors. IoT narrows the gap between the data-collecting sensors and the application interface, where data can be collected, managed, and analyzed with the help of cloud computing. The set of rules and regulations, i.e., the protocol, will decide when, how, and what to communicate. IoT has many applications in the environment, warehouse, disaster management, Smart home, transportation and agriculture, etc.
India is ranked second in the World after the United States regarding the arable land area. 70% of India's population lives in rural areas, and their main occupation is agriculture. There is a need to expand the agriculture sector to have a balance between supply and demand. Smart Agriculture will provide an opportunity to detect climatic changes and their effects on the farms. It will also have proper connectivity between the sensors and the application(Jaiswal et. al.,2019). It will further increase productivity, which ahead will enhance the revenue. The production, however, is adversely affected by climatic changes, limited resources and soil degradation. Smart Agriculture utilizes the resources efficiently by adapting to the local conditions. It increases sustainability and employs in the rural area, increasing the revenue along the supply chain.
Smart Agriculture offers a more straightforward method that can be applied to any farm irrespective of the area in the field. IoT transmits field data at high speed. The data analysis is very vital to the farmers. Smart Agriculture has the precision applications such as livestock monitoring, irrigation, fertilizers, soil quality monitoring, crop monitoring, pest control &intruders detection, weather monitoring and warehouse &logistics management. Figure 1 shows various domains of Smart Agriculture(Suma et. al., 2021).
Figure 1. Domains of smart agriculture
To give a comprehensive overview, we kept focus on smart agriculture. The database selected are Web of Science, Scopus and IEEE Explore. The keyword was searched in the Title, abstract of the research papers. Later Internet of Things for Farming was searched in the database. The most cited papers were chosen for writing the Book Chapter.
The Chapter is divided into 5 sections, Section 1 discuss about the Inttoduction to the Smart Agriculture. Section 2 describes about the sensors and communication in agriculture. Section 3 elaborates various applications of Smart Agriculture. Section 4 highlights the challenges in the Smart Agriculture and Section 5 Summarizes on the Future of the Precision Agriculture.
Figure 2.
Flowchart of literature review