Digital Innovative Smart Farming and Smart Sensing Management in Agriculture

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The biggest challenges facing sustainable agriculture and development worldwide are financial cost, food shortage, data privacy and security, and population growth. These obstacles inevitably affect the decrease of greenhouse gas emissions and the stumbling of biodiversity loss, which leads to the preservation of natural resources. ?Nevertheless, since the ultra-fast 5G has been switched, processing and transferring data procedures have become more accessible, leading to an advanced level of innovative digital solutions for farming and smart sensor energy.

Smart Sensing for Revolution Agriculture

Smart sensors are one of the foundations of the Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture. These complicated devices transmit wireless data store, and analyze environmental conditions such as plant health, soil quality, temperature, humidity, and light intensity. Monitoring systems are an example of smart irrigation systems that support farmers remotely in monitoring climate sensors, livestock health, the efficiency of irrigation, plant growth, and water levels, leading to making a suitable decision, as well as taking actions properly to optimize crop production, which brings the power of transformation to the agriculture world both in terms of quantity and quality.

Why LTE isn’t Enough? 5G Network on Smart Farming

Although the technology of 3G, 4G, and NB-IoT wireless networks In the last decade, used to connect smart devices through the IoT to share data, processes a speed for transmitting communication and information adequately, the efficiency of the 4G network and data transmission has dropped as compared to the previous period, as a result of the development of 5G network; it provides a very high speed transforming the data in a significantly shorter time, expressing the fifth-generation communication networks’ evolution. The upload speed of 5G is merely 100 times faster than the 4G network.

The starting point of 5G was launched in 2017. At that time, it was used by drones and autonomous tractors for seed operations, pesticides, fertilization, and crop harvesting to optimize the performance of smart farming applications. Two years later, although 4 out of 5 UK rural population was still outside of the 4G band, in 2020, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, and some European countries were the countries using the 5G network widely.

These days, 5G can support a real-time, more significant number of connected farms via IoT devices, compared to 3G or 4G connectivity, which can only allow the entire farm’s sensor data to be uploaded by the end of the day. Hence, the farmers will receive vital information about their farm instantaneously. Not only is 5G a powerful technology, but it also has a standard of flexibility as it can adapt quickly to various connections of smart IoT farming.

A significant benefit of the 5G New Radio standard is an air interface launched after the 4G network. It allows farmers to stream drone’s live video flying all around the field undisrupted, ensuring the efficiency of energy and productivity while combining the reliability of the connection and higher bandwidth. Additionally, a new inactive mode is another benefit allowing faster reconnecting of devices after being halted; it is used to detect and respond, for example, once livestock walks over a designated area, as it uses fewer resources but more responsiveness.

The benefits of using smart applications’ 5G network are network energy in top efficiency, comprehensive coverage, flow performance and communication, low latency, high transferable data ability, and intense connection density compared to other networks. Consequently, there are plenty of impressive impacts on the sector of agriculture using 5G, improving servers’ agricultural operations, data analytics, and artificial intelligence robots.

IoT in Smart Agriculture

Smart homes and cities, smart agriculture, traffic control, and healthcare are examples of IoT, a promising and intelligent technology that has offered practical solutions and is uncommon in many areas. This advanced technology stimulates all equipment and devices to make a proper decision in fertilizer and irrigation supply by linking together, as it has created a remarkable development in agriculture management. ?

IoT is also integrated with cloud services to process and analyze data remotely, making decision-making easier. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are needed to collect data from diverse sensing devices. Additionally, automated devices, autonomous vehicles, ground sensors, and ICT are required by smart farm management, which depends on satellites, advanced mobile devices, and high-speed internet to be successful.

Drones Based on IoT in Smart Farming

Since the 1980s, drones have been used in agriculture but with limited use. However, with the growth of technological development and the expansion of IoT, the use of unmanned aircraft has become exponential. Crop health and growth data, including high-resolution images, are accurate by drones using sensors and 3D cameras flying over the field.

Real-time data on nutrient deficiencies, water usage, and plant stress are provided by remote sensing to farmers, so they can use these real-time data to plan fertilization, irrigation, soil analysis, crop spraying, crop inspection, monitoring crop health, planting, and management. Farmers can use drones to shoot photographs in detail and inspect farms vertically. Then, this data is cloud processing to detect early infestation of pests or signs of disease using a 5G connection.

5G Robotics and Automation in Smart Agriculture

Unlike humans, robots operate more consistently and precisely, especially with automation systems that can support farmers in automating their work, for instance, weeding, harvesting, and planting, ultimately reducing costs and increasing farming efficiency.

These multiple agricultural activities have been used in Europe, the US, and various Asian countries. Robots can decrease farm pesticide pollution by up to 4 out of 5, and they also propose irregular solutions for smart agriculture to illustrate the COVID-19 situation when facing labor shortages.

To increase productivity and reduce labor costs, robots provide precision and accuracy in planting crops, as they can reduce the number of seeds being used with faster speed based on IoT, such as pesticide spraying and water sprinkling. They snap photos of plants and send them to a cloud-based server based on an ML algorithm to generate, then send them back to robots. With the high-speed 5G connection, it takes less than a second to complete the cycle process.

Threats and Future Possibilities

Even though smart sensors and IoT based on smart farming have produced significant acceptable consequences, the same deployment on a larger scale level is still awaiting. The financial cost is one of the main problems as there is an unpredictability of profit gaining and implementation costs: system operation, software installation, and hardware purchase.

Another issue is security and data privacy, as attackers could damage the automated farming procedure of stored data in cloud servers. A reliable encryption system is required to protect the system. Despite limited cyber-attacks on rigid keys’ cryptography, a blockchain practice or homomorphic encryption is a joint computation system that can provide a trustworthy result.

The third issue is harsh environmental conditions with exposure to outdoor installation devices, such as uncleared temperature, strong wind, dust, snow, rainfall, etc. More reliable output must be produced to build sophisticated devices in the long term to protect these devices from adverse environmental factors.

Conclusion

IoT is considered a pillar in smart agricultural technology as it is the central connection between smart systems. It can also reduce pest attacks and control pest populations. Several advanced sensors are related to processing units, analyzing data, and making appropriate real-time decisions.

The 5G network leads the smart agriculture field with UAV and robot systems controlled by AI. It provides flexible and efficient solutions, supporting developing countries to achieve farm sustainability and improving the agriculture sector.

Despite much positivity, there needs to be sufficient knowledge of using IoT devices by farmers who reside in rural areas. Additionally, software and hardware deployment of smart sensors on a larger scale and maintenance and purchasing costs are vital obstacles.

As a result, reducing the food demand gap can be attributed to the increase in agricultural production and smart agriculture's importance. However, governments should support these farmers’ financial, innovative technologies, data encryption, and digital literacy, especially in third-world countries.

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