Ai-driven Precision Farming is the future
A glance into the future is, indeed, possible by examining the current trends and tech innovations that are flooding the market. All industries are, in one or another, deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (Ml)-based tools and services. Agriculture and specifically, Precision Farming is no exception. Such advancements can be a huge asset for the Indian farmers as well. The predicted food demand is increasing by 70 per cent by the year 2025, forcing agriculture and its stakeholders to adopt new and advanced technologies to meet the increasing needs of food production.
The way emerging innovations are revolutionising the partnerships between customers and market operators has been extensively debated over the last few years. So far, the majority of the enthusiasm about agriculture's technological potential has been focused on improved production, land conservation, and effective agricultural input utilisation.
Using smart technology to develop areas such as climate-smart agriculture, demand forecasting, and end-product management has the potential to create massive social, economic, and environmental benefits. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO) estimates, global food demand will increase by 70 per cent by 2025, necessitating an increase in overall food output.
Farmers must now gather and analyse a plethora of information from different sensors to become more effective in the processing and communication of relevant information. Precision farming, in particular, is emerging as an innovative solution for farmers to maintain their farms to satisfy not only food requirements but also scarcity challenges.
Evolution and recent advances
Farmers have been on the fence of precision farming for a long time. During the 1980s, there was a revolution in precision farming, with renewed interest in the variability of soil fertility, moisture, and hydraulic properties.
As a result of significant efforts to address nutritional and product protection, labour welfare, economic accountability, and environmental footprint, smart farm management systems and precision farming have
gained widespread popularity.
In recent years, greater access to big data and advanced analytics along with the emergence of smart, Gps-navigated, and increasingly accurate agricultural technologies has helped push many farm management systems onward.
It is predicted that precision agriculture and automation will be the norm, even among smallholders, across the ‘sowing to harvesting’ value chain. The entry of 5G in 2021 has made Internet of Things (IOT) much faster and smoother, with the Global IOT market reaching $9 trillion, powering 36 billion IOT devices in total. By 2020, technology is expected to become semi or fully autonomous, with its application based on advanced analysis done by AI and machine learning (ML) drones, terrestrial robots, Iot-enabled sensors, AI and ML -based advisory, which means that farms can be operated by one person, thus greatly boosting labour productivity.
Projected trends in Precision Farming
Automation of farm activities with smart machines and Remote Sensing of detailed farm parameters that allow these machines to act with precision for desired outcomes are the two components that will shape the future of precision technologies in India.
1. Sensors and Actuators of Internet
of Things
Farms will become ‘alive’ this decade, sensing and interacting temperature, nutrients, moisture, and crop health as living breathing systems, and we will be able to build digital twins of farms, significantly improving our ability to model the effect of interventions before evaluating them in the real world. 5G networks, brought in 2021 and 7G by the end of the decade, will improve the effectiveness of IOT by allowing for ultra-fast cross-exchanges between phones, sensors, and satellites, as well as hyper-accurate early detection crop monitoring. This sensing, when combined with VRTS on-farm robots, will allow each plant in each region of the field to be handled individually. In scaled agriculture, this has never been seen before. Large and medium farmers, who dominate 30 per cent of agricultural land, can use these technologies to grow estate and cash crops. Rental models and farmer groups would eventually enable costs and sensing to be spread through larger areas managed by smallholders, making Indian agriculture “alive” and measurable in real-time.
2. AI and Agriculture
For the farmer, the essence of farm work may also shift. By 2030, AI will have progressed beyond the existing Artificial Narrow Intelligence in agriculture, which aims to mimic human intelligence within programmatically specified realms. Agriculture would see the implementation of general intelligence and, to a lesser degree, Super Intelligence, where computers are used to make decisions. Computers would be able to self-guide and match human intelligence. This will allow true and deep farm automation, transforming farm robotics from basic command-driven machines to intelligent self-directing and self-correcting farmworkers.
3. Unmanned Aerial and Terrestrial
Robots
In large commercial crop and animal value chains, autonomous and semi-autonomous agricultural robots can replace labour-intensive human activities and drudgery. Although this will continue to be a popular use, fleet operators and big farmers will increasingly demand autonomous robots for tasks such as weeding, spraying, and harvesting, which require a lot of manual labour and have a high rate of human error. Variable-rate technology (VRT) will be applied to existing systems first. Tractors (for land preparation) are increasingly finding their way through the workplace.
Robot prototyping to improve their functionality, payload, and ease of use taking care after the target would be to make a broader spectrum of end effectors possible. Another is to ensure that the robot population is diverse enough on the market to solve the wide range of agro-climatic areas in India, topography, and the crops that are grown. One of the most intriguing applications is the use of VRT on robots that allows for precise agrochemical spraying.
The most promising agricultural technology, from remote sensing to drones and robotics, are rapidly progressing into the future. Precision farming and farm management systems, in the sense of smart solutions, provide a wide range of agricultural methods for both today's and tomorrow's farmers.