Smart farming: The future of Agriculture
Smart farming can make a tremendous change in the field of agriculture and provides a huge opportunity to improve efficiency, profitability, sustainability, health and wellbeing to a greater extent. It helps farmers to make complex decisions during abruptive weather conditions and helps in savings resources. Smart farming has the potential to transform agriculture into a better prospect in the wake of climate change and decrease in the cultivable land.
A farming management strategy known as “smart farming” aims to improve the quantity and quality of agricultural products. From the farmer’s point of view, Smart Farming should provide the farmer with added value in the form of better decision making or more efficient exploitation operations and management.
Component of smart farming
- Hydroponics– Hydroponics is the growing plants by using water based nutrient solution.
- Aeroponics– Aeroponics is the growing of plants without soil. Instead, roots are suspended in the air and irrigated with a nutrient dense mist. This is differing from hydroponics, where plant roots are submerged in a solution of water and nutrients. In Aeroponics higher growth rate as compare to normal system of farming.
Drones are mainly used for and real time monitoring of insect, pest, weeds and disease attack. But drones are also a way to dramatically enhance the ability to track the crop growth and nutrient deficiency identification.
Driverless tractors are mainly used in smart farming for ploughing the agricultural field. As the tractor operates without any human, it is called as driverless tractor.
ROBOTS
A robot is a mechanical, artificial agent and is usually an electromechanical system. It is a device that, because of software programming, makes complicated tasks easy to perform.
APPLICATION OF ROBOTS IN AGRICULTURE
- Ploughing (Seed bed preparation) – the device used for navigation is an ultrasonic sensor which continuously sends data to the microcontroller.
- Robotic weeding- Removing their notorious unwanted growth is both time-consuming and difficult. That is why farmers are now using robotics to counter the challenge. Autonomous robots, powered with computer vision technology, are capable of exactly identifying the weeds and yanking them out before they could spread further
- Irrigation- precision irrigation emerges as a solution to reduce water wastage by targeting specific plants
Drones
A drone, commonly known as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) essentially, drone is a flying robot. The aircrafts may be remotely controlled or can fly autonomously through software-controlled flight plans in their embedded systems working in conjunction with on board sensors and GPS.
Application of drones in agriculture
- Drones are a very useful in smart farming system under this soil and field analysis is easily done. Drones are also helps in other agricultural practices such as, Irrigation, chemical applications, crop monitoring, plant height analysis, count and biomass estimates, presence of disease and weeds etc.
Benefits of smart farming
- Smart farming includes robotic systems, drones, mobile apps, satellite images analysis, and other modern smart farming practices can be effective not only directly for farmers. They can be used by insurance agents, input suppliers, financial institutions, agriculture cooperatives, and so on.
Challenges of smart farming
Lack of Internet- To implement smart agriculture technologies, you need a stable Internet connection. Unfortunately, it is not available in all regions of the world. Traditional beliefs of non-adopting technologies and following traditional method of cultivation, technical problems with respect to sensors and other instruments and Low awareness. Modern systems require fine-tuning and knowing the features of their operation. Some farmers do not fully understand the benefits of using smart farming technologies or do not know how to work effectively with them.
Future line of work
Providing skill and training for the farmers to access to the digital platform and popularizing and creating awareness of digital technologies. Development of smart farming technologies for marginal and small farming with affordable prices