Greater harmony is required between smart solutions before the true potential of the internet of things is to be realised

GFIA Europe, which runs in Utrecht, Holland, 9-10th May, will deliver a strong focus on smart agriculture solutions. I asked one of our exhibitors, Mr Srdjan Krco, CEO of DunavNET, to comment on opportunities not yet realized, market potential and the way forward in the Internet of Things.

Although the internet of things has huge potential in the agriculture industry and has already taken enormous strides, it is perhaps not yet as coherent or integrated as it should be.

Mr Krco explained that the market of precision agriculture solutions is currently highly fragmented, and has been created as a series of closed systems, which do not enable simple reuse of data in other applications. “Even when local systems are in place, data from one sensor platform (or a service) is often incompatible with data from other field resources, and there is no simple way to integrate them to extract valuable ‘correlated and actionable’ real-time information,” he said.

The combined challenge of analyzing these incompatible and now large, growing, and disparate data sets, as well as a fundamental inability to correlate data and create actionable events, has resulted in an agricultural technology environment that has failed to maximize the potential value of smart, connected products: “The next step in the design of smart agriculture solutions has to be in the direction of open systems, reusable services and the creation of widely available agriculture platforms that can serve as the basis for development of new solutions, adapted to different regions, different crops, machinery used and so on.”

There are still many challenges to be solved. For example: in sensor design, in enabling various in-situ measurements to replace costly and cumbersome sampling, laboratory measurements, ensuring reliable and accurate measurements in different environments (such as different types of soil). “The ability to remotely (or automatically) calibrate sensors will be one of the crucial factors that will determine the impact and success of smart agriculture solutions.”

Mr Krco believes another and probably the most significant challenge lies in data: “The ability to share data in a simple and efficient manner between different systems to enable extraction of relevant knowledge beyond what is possible in isolated systems.”

Associated with this is the availability of digital agricultural enablers: readily available digital components that represent digitalized agriculture expertise in an easily used form (accessible as web services for example) that can be combined with other IoT services to create new smart agriculture applications.

“The availability of such enablers would allow more rapid and widespread development of smart agriculture solutions by making agriculture expertise available to everyone in an easy to use and consume format. It would also open new opportunities for agriculture experts to address global markets and create an easier mechanism for converting extensive theoretical knowledge into a global product.

“Machine learning and advanced data analytics algorithms will play an important role towards the creation of full digital farming enablers capable of processing inputs gathered by various systems and potentially leveraging learnings from global agriculture production,” Mr Krco concluded.