Smart agriculture motivates more farmers every day via different applications with a view of maximizing food production as well as minimizing the climate change impacts, COVID-19 crisis, and natural resources shortages. Developing the agricultural production process based on smart agriculture and IoT technology has become extremely vital to preserve natural resources, increase sustainability and ecological agricultural food production, and satisfy food security demands. Smart agriculture is mainly based on sensing and monitoring micro-climate and environmental data (collection) and analysis. Data collected from different sources (internet, remote sensing database, and sensors) can provide a wealth of information for agriculture operators, allowing them to take appropriate actions in a timely manner. Developing microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators integrated with IoT to include all agricultural procedures especially in developed countries become more necessary.
TopSmart Agriculture
Efficiency, sustainability and profitability are the main targets of smart agriculture (also known as e-agriculture, and also precision agriculture).
Smart agriculture is one of the means of mitigation and adaption to climate changes impacts, as it works to save energy, irrigation water, fertilizers and chemical pesticides. Smart agriculture strongly supports sustainable agriculture to achieve the highest profitable productivity while reducing environmental, social and economic impacts. Smart agriculture relies on advanced technology in growing food in sustainable and environmental behavoir, rationalizing the use of natural resources, especially water. The most prominent feature is its reliance on information management and analysis systems to make the best possible production decisions, at the lowest costs, as well as the automation of agricultural processes such as irrigation, pest control, and soil control, and crop control (USAID 2016 and FAO 2021).
Smart agriculture motivates more farmers every day via different applications with a view of maximizing the food production as well as minimizing the ecological footprint under the climate change impacts, Coved 19 crisis and natural resources shortages. Smart hydroponic greenhouse developed rapidly during the last decade depending on the enormous development of communication technology, microcontrollers, sensors and actuators as well as simplifying the programming languages.
The need to access the real-record data of micro-climate and agricultural environmental conditions play a vital roles in make many smart decisions and affect directly on agricultural production. Needless to mention the huge advantages on different scales for detecting soil moisture and determine the evapotranspiration (ET0) for presenting Smart irrigation. Develop smart agriculture weather station and soil moisture sensor will offer the potential for providing an alarming system for extreme weather events as well as smart control in irrigation.
Smart farms have a real potential to deliver more productive and sustainable agricultural production based on a more resource-efficient approach.
The most interesting smart agriculture application could be summarized regarding Kanumuri (2020) as follows:
- 1.
Smart agriculture weather station based on IoT,
- 2.
Design, control, and management of irrigation system and fertigation program
- 3.
Smart management of different agricultural systems
- 4.
Monitoring the growth stages of crops and animals,
- 5.
The applications of drones and robots in monitoring, control, alarm, and process,
- 6.
Integrated pest management,
- 7.
Accomplish arduous agricultural work through automated mechanization,
- 8.
Smart harvesting process management,
- 9.
Smart Market chain management.
The rapid progress of communication, IoT, android mobile applications, developing electronic boards, and automation technology drive a new revolution in the agriculture sector to perform a new technology of smart agriculture. Many researchers (TongKe (2013), Agrawal & Kamboj (2019), Madushanki et al., (2019), Kanumuri (2020), FAO (2021)) had investigated the role of smart applications in precise agriculture that presented in 4 axes as follows: