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Precision Agriculture

Georgia_111220A
[Georgia State - Forbes]

 

Agriculture 4.0 – The Future Of Farming Technology

 

- Overview

The new generation of agricultural systems addresses climate change adaptation and investors' usual goals of increasing yields and reducing costs. Over the past few decades, agricultural technology (agtech) has made great strides in promoting increased crop yields and more efficient use of inputs such as water and fertilizers. 

More recently, productivity trends on U.S. farms have fluctuated due to a number of factors, resulting in significant market and price responses. Going forward, crop yield growth is expected to moderate. 

The recent recovery in agricultural commodity prices and income has opened up the potential to invest in new levels of agricultural technology, including precision agriculture (PA). A new generation of agricultural systems will help address climate change adaptation and the traditional goals of increasing yields and reducing costs. 

As climate change risks are recognized, mounting uncertainty clouded prospects for a continuation of historical trends in crop yield growth. Ensuring the success of sustainable food will be highly dependent on the deployment of PA technologies to increase the efficiency and resilience of agricultural systems.

 

- Smart Agriculture 4.0

Agriculture 4.0 is a term for the next big trends facing the industry, including a greater focus on precision agriculture, the internet of things (IoT) and the use of big data to drive greater business efficiencies in the face of rising populations and climate change.

The efficiency of farming lies in a farmer’s ability to predict natural conditions and react to them in the quickest way possible. A few decades ago, the precision of such forecasts wasn’t so reliable - now, it’s impressively high thanks to instant data gathering and distribution. The Internet of Things is successfully fueling precision agriculture as a new direction in farming.

The topics of cutting-edge research in the areas of cyber physical systems, IoT, and cloud platform and services for smart farming 4.0 include, but are not limited to:

  • Holistic cyber physical systems for smart farming
  • User-friendly and application-oriented visualization and decision support system
  • Interoperability of heterogeneous devices and actuators
  • Multi-support edge routers and communication protocols
  • Ontology, sensor metadata and semantic data
  • Big data systems and technologies
  • Scalable IoT cloud platforms for small to large farms
  • Massive data integration and fusion
  • Unmanned robotic vehicle, unmanned aerial vehicle, and collaborative processing of remote and proximity sensory data
  • Wireless network access medium, low power WiFi and BLE
  • Robust, energy efficient and long lifetime architecture of WSN node for outdoor application and field test
  • Robust and low cost user-friendly plug and play wireless sensor node, network architecture and implementation
  • New environment sensor technologies
  • Energy harvesting techniques for battery-less IoT node
  • AI and machine vision for agriculture and aquaculture.

 

- Machine Learning in Precision Agriculture

Machine learning (ML) has already begun to play an important role in making agriculture more efficient and effective. Machine learning in agriculture has the potential to be applied to various areas with outstanding results, from detecting weeds and diseases, predicting yield and quality of crops, to gathering data, providing insights, and offering predictions regarding livestock production.  

Precision agriculture (PA) relies on the collection, processing and analysis of data to improve agricultural productivity. On a modern farm, you can collect data using advanced technologies such as: 

  • self-driving cars
  • variable rate technology
  • GPS-based soil sampling
  • automation hardware
  • telematics
  • software
  • sensor
  • camera
  • robot
  • drone
  • GPS navigation
  • Control System

 

There is no doubt that machine learning-based equipment has brought the efficiency of agricultural systems to a new level. The technology increases crop productivity and enhances real-time tracking, harvesting, processing and marketing.

 

- More Information on Precision Agriculture

 

 

 

[More to come ...] 
 
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