Smart Farming: key to developing sustainable agriculture
Investors generally consider funding innovations in the agriculture sector a high risk area, the area where ‘sharks do not invest’. However, smart farming practices have gained significance these days.
Need of smart agriculture
- Windling natural resources, increasing population pressure and food demand in 21st century agriculture generate multiple challenges like production of more food and fiber to feed a growing population with a smaller rural labour force and more feedstocks for a potentially huge bioenergy market, especially in many agriculture dependent development countries including India.
- Further, abrupt weather fluctuations around the world have put huge pressure on agricultural food products for quality and sustainable food production.
- The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that the world population would reach 9.73 billion by 2050, and the increase will continue till it reaches 11.2 billion by 2100 (FAO, 2017).
- There are many challenges pertaining to restricted agricultural production like soil degradation through salinity, nutrient deficiencies, low soil organic carbon content, lower groundwater table, etc. More importantly climate change is also challenging agricultural productivity to sustain.
- Therefore, there is a need to make agriculture smart so the crop productivity could be sustained through mitigation of such challenges.
Smart farming
- The FAO first defined the climate smart agriculture has an approach that transforms agri-food systems to earth green and climate resilient practices.
- It aims to tackle three main objectives
- sustainably increasing agriculture and productivity and incomes
- adapting and building resilience to climate change
- reducing and or removing greenhouse gas emissions, wherever possible.
Development of Smart farming
- In India, the Green Revolution during 1960-70 advocated the use of mineral fertilizers as well as pesticides to increase agricultural production, parallel to the development of various agricultural machineries.
- During the last two decades, globally, there has been significant development in information communication technology (ICT) and artificial intelligence (AI).
- The use of ICT and AI makes farming systems smart with greater resource use efficiency.
- These Technologies have facilitated controlling the equipment and devices remotely.
- Now robots are being used in agricultural operations of harvesting and also drones are used to protect crops and monitor crop growth stages.
Benefits
- There are various applications of the use of digital technology in agriculture. There are many examples in the recent past in India where it enabled applications used in management and monitoring of pests and diseases in different crops.
- Many ICAR institutes have developed various mobile applications related to field crops, animals, horticultural crops etc. which helps in identification and subsequent diagnosis and treatment of plant diseases.
- Thus, advantages of smart farming can be summarized as follows
- Increasing the amount of real-time data on the crop
- Remote monitoring and controlling of farms
- Controlling water and other natural resources
- Improving livestock management
- Accurate evaluation of soil and crops
- Improving agricultural production
- Eco-friendly farming.
Challenges & Opportunities
- Smart farming is helpful for the farming community with real-time alerts. It helps in management and precise use of agricultural resources for sustainable food production and increased profits.
- To understand the challenges associated with smart farming in India, we have to consider a typical Indian farm and accordingly design smart tools and techniques which mean that smart farming has to be customized according to typical Indian small and marginal farmers.
- Thus, the main challenge is the small landholdings, fragmented farms and the farmers are unable to adopt smart farming with Limited knowledge and skills. Apart from these, there are many other technological challenges that also need to be improved to make smart forming a reality in India.
- Internet connectivity: Smart farming mainly relies on faster internet connectivity. Bridge between farmers, smart communication device and field best sensors for real time information in management is still a challenge. But most villages in farming communities do not have access to internet all the time this makes the adoption of smart farming difficult.
- GPS Signals: GPS signal transmission is difficult in heterogeneous topography like hilly, forests and field with the dense tree planting.
- Energy requirement: Data collection and processing centre and Many IOT based sensors need uninterrupted and continuous energy for a successful application. Whereas, developing countries like India are already running out of energy resources. So, this may be a major hindrance for large-scale production of smart forms in near future.
Road ahead
- The scenario for smart farming or digital agriculture is promising in India. Smart farming is to increase production and improve the efficient use of land, water and other resources used in agriculture.
- Therefore, smart farming is the future facilitating better utilization of precious resources inputs and environmental protection.
- Robust research and development in the field of smart farming is needed to that smart farming can a Indian farmers to sustain their farm productivity and livelihood
- The key factors to succeed in smart farming in India are-
- affordability of technology
- ease of access and operations
- easy maintenance of system
- timely grievance redressal and appropriate policy support
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