The traditional image of agriculture as an industry has been shed as farmers have adopted IoT technologies like sensors, cameras and better connectivity to improve yields and weather themselves to the challenges brought by climate change. Agriculture sensors represent one such technology.
If you’re interested in reading about the more general application of technologies to agriculture, you can check out the IoT Insider article on it here. The specific application of agriculture sensors will be covered in this piece more comprehensively.
The advantages of deploying agriculture sensors are pretty clear, representing an evolution from traditional sensors which would be standalone devices to collect information like soil health and temperatures; while IoT sensors are interconnected devices that communicate real-time data continuously.
IoT sensors have capabilities not only to communicate this data, but to collect it, allowing farmers to analyse potential patterns or correlations that might prove useful and inform them on how to farm accordingly, AKA precision agriculture. Sensors can also be used to reduce waste, conserve resources and detect early signs of disease or pest infestation.
Challenges in deploying an agriculture sensor
These benefits are clear – but there are also challenges that need to be addressed to fully realise their potential. This includes the initial investment in deploying IoT infrastructure, particularly for small scale farmers. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), estimates from 2021 place smallholder farmers as responsible for producing a third of the world’s food, highlighting not only their importance, but the reminder that not all farms are large-scale operations capable of big investments.
Another challenge is the varying reliable Internet connectivity, in remote, rural areas which tend to be devoted to farmland and agricultural operations. Operators have gone about addressing this connectivity gap differently – Adtran recently announced PhireLink was rolling out its fibre access technology to build a future-proof network.
TEAL announced a partnership with AquaSpy, where AquaSpy detailed its issues in finding a wireless solution for its soil moisture monitoring systems, and went with TEAL. TEAL uses its eSIM technology to provide connectivity for the systems. “This collaboration is set to drive sustainability and boost productivity in farming operations globally,” said Robby Hamblet, CEO of TEAL in the announcement.
Because agriculture sensors are typically wireless, they are battery-powered, and have a finite lifespan. Battery life is an important factor as frequent maintenance or replacement of these batteries can be costly and logistically challenging, and, in most cases, defeats the purpose of deploying and leaving a wireless sensor to work away.
The collection and transmission of sensors is energy-consuming. In an exclusive article, Suryash Rai, Product Applications Engineer at Analog Devices wrote that “power management is one of the focus areas to increase the efficiency of the IoT application”. In the article, Rai detailed that the battery life could be maximised through improving the sleep current.
Other areas to be looked at include optimising the data transmission process, which means sensors can be programmed to send data at intervals rather than continuously which reduces the amount of energy used. Communication protocols like LPWAN are designed to support low-power devices over long ranges and conserve battery life. Battery management solutions can help to understand battery performance through testing and monitoring.
Examples of deploying agriculture sensors
What deploying an agriculture sensor looks like in practice varies widely, reflecting the versatility and flexibility of these sensors in different use cases. For example, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow reported on the development of a sensor system to detect soil nutrients and improve fertility, acknowledging the issues poor soil health can have on agriculture.
The system in question takes inspiration from woodblocking processes to create low-cost soil sensors. “This project takes inspiration from woodblock printing, one of the oldest forms of printing in the world. It uses plant-based inks to create artwork and printed information. Instead of printing art, we are going to borrow these techniques, but combine them with functional materials, such as carbon black and enzymes to make biodegradable single use sensors,” explained Dr Andrew Ward, lead researcher from the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the time of announcement.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW Madison), in the US, engineers developed sensors for continuous monitoring of nitrate in soil types common to Wisconsin, to enable farmers to better understand the nutrient profile of their soil and therefore establish how much fertiliser is needed. The setup involves attaching sensing stickers to a rod and burying that rod in soil at different heights.
“By measuring the nitrate, moisture and temperature at different depths, we can now quantify the process of nitrate leaching and capture how nitrate is moving through the soil, which hasn’t been possible before,” said Joseph Andrews, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UW–Madison.
Final thoughts
The integration of IoT-enabled sensors into agriculture opens up many possibilities where soil health can be monitored and measured, and farmers can be provided with more data than before to potentially adjust how much fertiliser they use, or how much water for their crops, promoting precision agriculture and supporting farmers as they face off threats related to climate change.
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