Connecting devices to networks has come a long way since 1982, when a vending machine at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States was configured to report whether the drinks in it were cold.
The term Internet of Things was however coined in 1999 when Kevin Ashton, proposed that Procter and Gamble introduce radio-frequency identification tags to monitor the movement of stock.
Today, the potential value of IoT is large and growing. By 2030, it is estimated it could amount to up to $12.5 trillion globally. That includes the value captured by consumers and customers of IoT products and services.
In Kenya, IoT has the potential to improve the fortunes of the agricultural sector, which has for long been the backbone of the economy but has constantly faced challenges such as low productivity, unreliable weather patterns and poor soil.
IoT can provide real-time monitoring and analysis of crop and environmental conditions through remote sensing and smart farming technologies.
Remote sensing is the ability to obtain information about an area or object without direct physical contact. Today, it acts as one of the biggest inputs for data-driven smart agriculture. Digital agriculture – the use of new and advanced technology to enable smarter and more sustainable food production, depends largely on the availability of reliable external data that can translate to better decision-making throughout different stages of cultivation.
Population growth and the reduction of arable land are the two main challenges facing food production in the future. The information gathered through remote sensing will guide cultivation and harvesting decisions by providing cultivators with the right information at the right time.
Remote sensing devices monitor the field over a period and take various measurements that act as inputs for making decisions during the cultivation process. While in the initial stages, this could translate to identifying the right weather conditions conducive to planting a particular crop, during the cultivation phase, it could give the grower the ability to intervene and take action against pests or diseases before they spread to other areas and destroy the entire crop.
The information presented to stakeholders in different parts of the agricultural value chain comes primarily from three external data sources: weather information, earth observation, and field information collected using ground, aerial, and satellite sensors.
While ground sensors are typically handheld or mounted on tractors and combine harvesters, aerial sensors involve the use of drones that can capture data about the field within a limited radius. Satellite sensors provide the most extensive and detailed coverage of large masses of land without any limitation in terms of size or historical depth of information.
The combined insights gathered from all these sources help the stakeholders in the agri-ecosystem take more informed and well-timed decisions regarding their crops. Remote sensing impacts different aspects of cultivation and enables smarter farming decisions by: Knowing what to plant and determining the right time to harvest, soil mapping and forecasting irrigation needs, assessing crop health across stages and accurate yield prediction, monitoring drought and weather-related dependencies and protecting crops against pests and diseases.
Smart Farming Technologies
For several millennia, farming consisted of large spans of land, natural sunlight, natural and artificial irrigation and guarding against natural predators. Over the last few centuries, humans have increased and optimised the output of traditional, old-school farming by increasing land size, utilising more complex irrigation technology and reducing predation with pesticides. However, the long-term impacts of this methodology are becoming increasingly taxing on ecological and human health.
Luckily for our planet, IoT has helped the agriculture industry make massive strides towards the future of smart agriculture. Companies such as John Deere, a global agriculture equipment manufacturer, are developing smart farming precision agriculture technology that gathers data to help farmers make more informed decisions and reduce resource consumption. For example, their IoT-enabled guidance systems can guide their large-scale tractors with an accuracy of +/- 6 inches, thereby reducing the number of harvesting passes through a field.
Impressively, they have also developed See and Spray technology that uses AI image detection to identify unwanted plants in a field and target herbicides to only the unwanted plants, instead of spraying the entire field with herbicides. This new technology takes a conscious, precise approach to pest mitigation. As a result, resource consumption is reduced, as is the unnecessary use of potentially hazardous chemicals.
Other companies, such as DJI Agriculture, are creating new, advanced data collection solutions that can help keep agriculture professionals informed about their resources on a small and large scale. For example, DJI offers state-of-the-art, drone-powered multispectral analysis products that can detect key performance indicators in the soil, such as moisture, temperature, and vegetation location; and allow farmers to identify and target problems in an exact location.
Additionally, DJI is taking a new, targeted approach to fertiliser distribution. By implementing agricultural IoT drone technology, they can map a farm’s critical resources, identify automated flight paths of the drone, and distribute fertiliser in exact locations while achieving better-than-human distribution.
As one of the largest IoT-powered sub-industries in agriculture, soil monitoring technologies provide farmers with real-time, large-scale soil metric data. This allows them to fertilise and irrigate their farms more accurately, increasing efficiency and reducing resource consumption.
Smart farming technologies are booming, and new exciting IoT farming technologies are cropping up daily (pun intended). The IoT Agriculture and Smart Farming market is projected to reach USD 66.8 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 18.40 per cent during the forecast period (2022–2030).
Agricultural IoT makes machines smarter, gives more data to farmers, and enables fundamental changes to how farms work. It’s no doubt that smart farming will only get smarter, and the Internet of Farm-Things will continue to grow.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to transform the agriculture industry, providing real-time monitoring and analysis of crop and environmental conditions.
To fully leverage the benefits of IoT especially in the agricultural sector in Kenya, investments in the right technology and infrastructure are necessary, as is a culture of innovation and collaboration.
