Internet of things in Precision Agriculture

Agriculture is a crucial aspect of man’s existent, hence areas of research in this field cannot be undermined or over-emphasized. It is expected that experts in this field should work round the clock for new discoveries, creative solutions to handle the very basic aspect of life -FOOD. It is a known fact that the earth consists of the following matter: Man, soil, water, climate, plants, and animals. For research, developments, innovation, and creation to continue, man must be alive. Plants and animals are needed to sustain humanity; hence the study of Agriculture is founded on how to ensure the continuous availability of crops and livestock. In addition, man, plants, and animals will need the soil, weather, and water to grow to continue to exist. As man and animal exist, the population of the world will continue to increase.

Emphatically, because the population of the earth will continue to increase, the need of speedy expansion of crop and animal farming is very pertinent. Recent research by the UN Food and FAO predicted that the earth population will get to 9.1 billion by 2050 (4) against the 2018 estimated population of 7.6 Billion based on a projection that population growth is 83 million people per year (5). With this projection, it is obvious that the usual ways of agriculture will definitely not solve the demand of food for the growing population. This glaring reality of the possibility of food scarcity due to rapid population growth is a wake-up call to all Agricultural specialist (18), government agencies and farmers. The application of the mixture of automated systems, AI, wireless sensor network with the emerging features of the Internet of Things (IoT) in Agriculture will be the enabling Technology to ensure that the fear of food insecurity is eliminated. In addition, the known activities of man on earth ranging from pollution from industrial, exploration, drilling, mining, and so on poses an unimaginable threat to the available resources to sustain Agriculture (30)

IoT has been defined in various ways by various writers and authors. Wikipedia defined it as “The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of devices such as vehicles, and home appliances that contain electronics, software, actuators, and connectivity which allows these things to connect, interact and exchange data” (2). Another definition by Webopedia is “The Internet of Things refers to the ever-growing network of physical objects that feature an IP address for internet connectivity, and the communication that occurs between these objects and other Internet-enabled devices and systems” (6). In this project, IoT will be simply defined as connecting all variants of devices that relates with all aspect of life to the Internet for the purpose of communication, controlling and sharing of information for one ultimate reason-Decision making alongside its application. This decision making is aided by a lot of data processing and analytics through various manipulation of IoT hardware, network architecture and data with programming languages. Top of list of the programming languages used are Java, C and Python (10).

The various areas that IoT has been applied can be categorized into Consumer, Commercial, Industrial, Infrastructure, application (2). It is known to have improved various areas of life applications and processes. This project work will explore one of the Industrial applications of IoT – Agriculture. This project work will seek to explore the key principles of ensuring that food scarcity will never be experienced due to the projected overwhelming yearly population growth.

Problem Statement:

This project will focus on IoT in Precision Agriculture. It broadly covers all the aspects of Crop farming and Animal farming. Merriam Webster Dictionary defined it in details as “the science, art, or practice of cultivating the soil, producing crops, and raising livestock and in varying degrees the preparation and marketing of the resulting products” (3). The reason for this project in Agriculture is basically because everything that concerns the success of the world revolves around agriculture. It handles the core surviving basic of life – Food. Man needs to eat to be alive to create more innovations, discover more life secrets and manage all ramification of life expectations. The study of the best practices, integration of the best architecture, infrastructure and platforms will enable us to wage war against scarcity of food based on the alarming rate of projected population growth.

Scope of Project

This project will focus IoT in Precision Agriculture as a solution to food availability for the overwhelming forecasted world population growth. This study will be based on existing related works.

It will be organized in sections. Section 1: This will highlight various areas where IoT has been applied and examples. Section 2: Overview of enabling Technology in IoT; Section 3: IoT in agriculture, highlight areas of application, but will discuss only four (4) areas of application. Section 4: the core of this project IoT in Precision Agriculture with a focus on crop and livestock farming monitoring and management to achieve the expected production level of food to sustain the expected continuous rapid world population growth. Section 4 will highlight the benefits, challenges, and solution of IoT in Agriculture.

Section 1: Key areas of IoT application with examples

• Traffic(19)
• Consumer (24)
• Education (17)
• The legal system (20)
• Government sector (21),(22)
• Healthcare (23)
• Transportation (19),(26)
• Housing (25)
• Industrial (2)(29)

Section 2: Overview of the enabling of IoT enabling Technology

• Hardware level
• Software level (OS, Programming Lang, Machine Languages etc)
• Communication level
• Network protocol level
• Standardization (2)
• Data processing

Section 3: IoT in Agriculture and 4 areas of Applications

• IoT -Agriculture Irrigation (14),(15)
• IoT -Agriculture Fertilization (14)
• IoT -Agriculture on Soil
• IoT- Precision Agriculture (13)

Section 4: IoT Precision Agriculture

• Crop farming
• Application of IoT in crop farming
• Livestock farming
• Application of IoT in livestock farming

Section 5: The Critical 3 pillars of sustainable crop and livestock farming with IoT

• IoT Platforms
• Crop & Livestock monitoring
• Crop & Livestock Management

Section 6: Challenges

• Challenges in IoT Agriculture
• Challenges of IoT in Precision Agriculture

Section 6: Benefits of IoT

• Benefits in IoT Agriculture
• Benefits in IoT Precision Agriculture

Section 7: Future study and possible implementation:

During my survey, I noticed that there are no emphasis yet on long term preservation and storage on IoT in Agriculture. The fact that there are security issues in IoT and possible massive natural disasters on crops and animals, there is a need for stop-gap provision pending farm recovery. The big question is what happens when Agricultural systems are hacked, and disaster occurs. This should be achieved by IoT in preservation and storage for both Crop and Livestock. This is expected to be achieved with IoT laboratory and long-span IoT enabled preservation and storage facilities. The stage for IoT lab has been set, which involves common platform where IoT ideas, innovation, research and test are carried out globally(34). IoT Agricultural laboratory that involves and the Agricultural specialist, farmers and regulatory bodies should be established to pursue sustainability of crop and livestock produce for the emerging global population growth.

Future research should focus on :

• Crop storage systems and IoT devices to monitor inventory, quality of crop against natural negative impacts like new diseases outbreak, moisture prevention and possible contamination with other earth's factors. Models should be put in place to analyze and accurately track expected permissible period for storage, time to release the storage for feeding and time to re-stock the storage. As many models as possible should be applied to ensure that the Agricultural sector is ready to embrace any unforeseen and possible food availability issue in future.
• Preservation of farm animal breed specimen in some kinds of IoT enabled laboratories. This idea gave birth from the premises of egg preservation for human conception. In China, the population policy was initially one family one child. Recently, in order to improve the population, the policy has been increased to two. Unfortunately, many mothers who wished to have more Children have passed reproductive age. A few mothers allowed their eggs to be harvested and preserved in the hospitals, hoping that the population policy of One family, one child will be amended someday. These are the parent smiling now. In an event of a natural catastrophe that may decrease the population of livestock to feed humanity. The perceived challenges for this quest will be the financial implication.