Smart Farming: How IoT-Driven Precision Agriculture Helps Feed the Globe

By Express Computer

The world’s population is steadily growing and as per the United Nations estimate, roughly 83 million people are added to the global population every year, writes Ranjeet Koul at Express Computer. By 2050, the number of people on planet Earth is projected to reach 9.8 billion. While the scientific community has begun to view old fears about overpopulation as unfounded, the rapidly expanding human population presents genuine and real-time challenges to economic, agricultural, and communal infrastructures. Farmers, especially in the emerging and developing economies like Asia Pacific, Africa, and SAARC regions face an ever-growing demand to produce more food on smaller landholdings, even as they struggle to protect their farms against extreme weather, climate change, environmental impact, market fluctuations, etc.

To inclusively feed this massive population, it is imperative to have transformation in agriculture with disruptions from next-generation technologies like the Internet of Things, AI, ML, robotics etc. These latest technologies, especially IoT, not only provide a way to better measure and control growth factors, like irrigation, water, and soil conservation and limit the use of fertilizers on a farm only to the bare minimum requirements, but, also changes how we view agriculture in its entirety. According to a CII report, with more than 500+ agritech start-ups in India, the agritech momentum is gaining pace due to which many of these start-ups are leveraging technologies like AI, machine learning, etc. for improving efficiency, yield, speeding up agricultural finance, and other functions that are vital for India’s agricultural growth. To meet the increasing needs of a growing population and get the most yield from their farms, growers are turning to new technology powered by the Internet of Things (IoT). New “smart farming” applications, based on IoT technologies, will enable the agriculture industry to reduce waste and enhance productivity.

IoT-enabled precision agriculture techniques give farmers productive tools to optimize every farming task. These technology-driven practices are focused on increasing crop yields and profitability while lowering the levels of traditional inputs (water, fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides) that are needed to grow crops.

Continue reading at Express Computer.