Farming is the primary source that brings food to our tables. It is one of the most essential occupations to also supply humans with employment options all over the world. However, traditional farming methods like plowing the fields with the help of livestocks and ancient tools are now being replaced with advanced and latest technologies like IoT.
Better and innovative options are a must in today’s date to fulfill the demands of the growing population at a quicker pace. However, in the 21st century, where every hand is equipped with a smartphone, farmers still depend on seasonal phenomenon and weather forecasts to afford crops. This causes immense delays in the process of sowing seeds and maintaining the crops to gain productivity. Had it been a technological implementation to predict favorable environmental conditions for each crop produced, it would have created more secured production and reduced the amount of crop destruction due to unpredicted rains or other weather conditions.
Let’s know more about IoT technology and how it can help in crop management.
Smart IoT Concepts for Intelligent Farming
Everchanging weather conditions like increasing/decreasing temperatures, changing rain patterns, and groundwater density can affect the crop yield in many ways. For the farmers who cultivate their fields depending on natural conditions like rains also affect the farming practices. It is quite beneficial to leverage the latest and advanced technologies like cloud, AI, and IoT to predict the best time for sowing the seeds, analyzing the pest control, and commodity pricing that can supposedly increase the income of farmers as well as overall crop production. This technological transformation is highly beneficial as the long-overdue assistance for the farmers that provides them with large area opportunities to manage their farms smartly.
80% of the farmers in the US utilize one or more smart farming technologies for effective crop management. Smart farming techniques constitute a suite of modern information and communication technologies like precision equipment, sensors and actuators, geo-positioning systems, robotics, IoT, big data, and many more that fulfill the exact requirement of the farmers and provide them with suitable guidance and measures for smart farming.
The installed sensors on the fields and farming machines help predict the overall yield of the farm. The latest and advanced capabilities of sensor devices help capture valuable data for better analysis. Predicting soil quality, humidity, temperature, water retention, rainfall, and weather conditions data are considerable ways to convert traditional farming methods into intelligent practices.
Predicting Pest Existence
Farms are highly vulnerable to pest attacks, which can pose a serious impact on the crops and cause heavy losses. The recent locust attacks have created an urgent need for modern technologies in the farming sector to prioritize crop safety. The Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence technologies are consolidated with well-structured prediction algorithms that help the farm managers to identify the risk areas regarding pest attacks in advance and implement necessary steps to mitigate such challenges. Enabling smart IoT techniques to allow farmers to take preventive actions and save against losses with increased ROI.
Moreover, predictive insights about the pest attacks in a particular region help the farmers to adopt intelligence as the key alternative for reducing crop loss due to pests.
Drone Monitoring
It is one of the most innovative ways to capture real-time data from the fields and track every activity of the entire farm. These devices help the farmers as their assistants by hovering over the entire land and analyze the growth rate of the crops. An IoT-powered drone device gathers multispectral, thermal, and hyperspectral imageries to grab every information of the field and measures crop health via heat signatures. This advancement in technology is helping improve the traditional ways of farming by taking care of both surface-based and air-based agriculture like crop spraying, screening, planting, irrigation, and field analysis.
Some more advantages of using drones to monitor framing lands include accurate crop health imaging, ease of use, GIS mapping, time, and energy savings. It helps in predicting the field insights by reflecting plant health indices on your connected smart gadget, giving every detail of the plant from its everyday growth to the basic requirements for better growth.
Crop Screening through IoT
Traditional practices in agriculture are still followed in various corners. This is due to a lack of proper knowledge of implementing innovative ideas for better production. Most of all, many farming practices depend on the natural predictions of the climate and weather forecasts, which most of the time fails. This causes a huge loss to the farmers and results in bad decisions. Knowing the advantages of the amounts of soil moisture required, water needed for irrigating the fields, and air quality for different crops underline the importance of IoT methods that are a must in current weather changing times.
Therefore, researchers and analysts have come up with the unique technique of crop screening with IoT. The concept sets a milestone in the agricultural business by introducing remote monitoring and better reliability. This digitalized method for agricultural and farming activities allows the farmers to seek better requirements for their crops and predict future scenarios for improved decisions.
Smart farming through IoT is a stepping stone to constitute millions of devices or assets for intelligent decisions and better agricultural practices. Enhancing the traditional ways by implementing the latest technology not only helps the farmers in better production but also increases the chances of gaining profits. Smart techniques like drone monitoring allow remote monitoring of the fields, crop screening through IoT, and predicting pest attacks on the fields inculcates intelligence and more advanced benefits to the farmers.
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