With technology swirling around in every industry through the growing developments of IoT or Internet of Things, there is a growing number of devices coming online that are connected and taking care of the comforts of your home, living in a smart city, working within health or fitness to automobiles or logistics on to industrial IoT and beyond. It only makes sense that IoT would touch on one of our largest industries — agriculture.
IoT has not only reached agriculture but it has the potential to immensely improve nearly every aspect of the tradition. To still be reliant on horses and plows when the modern world is existing using cars that can drive themselves and we live hand-in-hand with virtual reality, seems antiquated, to say the least. While there hasn’t been tremendous popularity in using IoT in agriculture yet, the market is still considerably dynamic and continually growing.
How To Use IoT In Agriculture
The number of ways as to how to use IoT in Agriculture, according to BI Intelligence continues to grow and the number of IoT agricultural device installs could possibly reach upwards of over 70 million by 2020 with a growth of over 20%, and by 2025 the global agricultural smart market is set to triple at over $15 billion. But why do farmers want to invest in IoT; what benefits could it actually bring to them?
- Agricultural smart sensors collect loads of data some of which can detect the quality of the soil, weather, growth of the crop, the health of the livestock. The data is capable of keeping track of the state of the business itself along with the employees, the equipment that you use, and countless other aspects of the industry. This alone is going to result in higher revenues that the farmers will see at the end of the day.
- You’ll have less risk as you are more able to control the overall production. If IoT allows you to foresee the amount of production that you will be putting out, this lets you plan more easily for the distribution process. This will prevent you from having unsold products lying around because you will be able to determine just how much you need to harvest. This prevents wastes.
- Just being able to keep tabs on the livestock health and any anomalies with the crops will enable you to mitigate any type of risks with loss of your yield.
- Multiple processes can be automated giving much greater business efficiency including things such as fertilisation, irrigating, and pest control.
With the continuous growth of the population, it is impossible to keep increasing the amount of land that is used for farming and the production capabilities for the farmers, the only possible way to increase the volume of food is to improve the efficiency of the production. The way to improve efficiency in this day and age is through technology and that technology is IoT. There is no doubt that smart agriculture will help farmers with the challenges they are facing. It seems essential.
