Innovations in Agriculture
I lived in Minnesota for over 16 years of my life. Farming and Agriculture is an integral fabric of the state’s economy and livelihood. With the increase in average lifespan of humans and the population, there is a tremendous demand to grow healthy food in a sustainable way. I am constantly amazed at the pace of innovation if one of the oldest occupations of mankind. Some of the areas of innovation that I personally find impressive are turnkey Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in the field of Agriculture from Microsoft and AWS that leverage Cloud and AI for reducing waste and to maximize farm productivity. In this article we will take a sneak peak at some some of these advancements in the field.
This paper is a good reference that started the innovation and the point of view on the Azure Platform and does a good job of showing the different elements of the FarmBeats platform.
The platform is built on top of the barebones Azure IoT reference architecture
The solution uses sensors to collect the information from the field and can manage features such as below:
· Monitor and control the amount of moisture in the soil so that adequate water is supplied for a healthy growth of the plant
· Monitor and control the soil temperature to facilitate root growth, respiration, decomposition, and mineralization of Nitrogen
· Monitor and control the solar radiation for Photosynthesis
· Predict weather patterns such as wind speed, rainfall, air pressure, wind speed etc.
· Monitor and control the NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium) levels and pH(acidity or basicity of soil) levels using NPK sensors. This is pretty exciting to be able to fine tune the near perfect conditions of nutrients based on the plant. For instance, Nitrogen is responsible for the growth of leaves. For growing green vegetables, a higher dose of Nitrogen would be appropriate. Phosphorus is responsible for root growth, flower, and fruit development. For growing fruits and flowers, a proportional increase in Phosphorus makes more sense.
·Support the use of drones to detect issues in crop quality using image recognition
Besides tracking what happens on the field, one of the other jobs of the farmer is to make sure that the farm equipment and machinery runs without any problems. IoT helps in this space to detect any malfunctioning of equipment with the help of sensors on these devices for preventive maintenance
But, what about connectivity?
It is interesting to note that farms are located in the rural areas and connectivity is pretty limited. The advancements in the area of intelligent edge devices and 5G enable running machine learning models on the edge and connecting with the Cloud periodically using a local gateway when available. One of the creative ways to provide connectivity in these rural areas is using “TV White Space”. There are unused TV channels in the VHF and the UHF spectrum that are referred to as “buffer” channels. These were traditionally placed between two active channels to avoid broadcast interference. The idea here is to use these unused channels to provide broadband internet access to these areas of limited connectivity. Whereas the traditional Wi-Fi router provides about 100 m range, TV White space range can be in the order of 10 kilometers in diameter.
A second solution that is being introduced by Microsoft is the Azure Space. By the official definition, it is a new set of offerings to provide an integrated cloud and satellite experience to provide fast secure cloud computing capabilities anywhere on the planet. There will be more innovation in this space as “Things” become even more ubiquitous and pervasive across all aspects of our business and life. With the connectivity becoming more pervasive, the platforms that enable smarter devices at the edge being first class citizens will be more of a norm.
There are a couple of other related topics of how technology is used for animal farming, fishing, and latest advancements in Edge Computing that we will review in a subsequent article. Happy Farming :)
