IoT Worlds
Smart Farming

IoT and Remote Sensing in Smart Agriculture

Majority of human kind all over the world was fed by the food produced from agricultural land. There are 37.6% of land area around the world (i.e. 4,889 million ha) classified as an agricultural land. By 2050 the % of agriculture land was supposed to increase since the population increases to 10 billion. To increase the production, quantitatively or qualitatively the 40%-50% of the agricultural land was prone to synthetic fertilizers. These inorganic fertilizers contain nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc. to provide essential nutrients to the soil.

Some evidence suggests that the farmers over-apply or abuse the fertilizers from an agronomic perspective (more than the needed amount). When fertilizers go beyond the limit, it becomes “Efficient Waste”. These overuse of fertilizers can lead to vulnerable environmental consequences. There are no such centralized services in India that prescribe a fertilizer dosage, pesticide, and irrigation plans to the farmers.

To provide this service, Our Idea – “starts from satellite and flows all the way to the open agricultural soil “. Our mission – “To empower every farmer to grow healthier crops, at lower/nil environmental harm”.

How big is the problem:

The farmers always look for the good in people, they are not voluntarily abusing the fertilizers. The problem is that they do not know the dosage amount, time, and frequency according to their crop and soil. Farmers to provide people with good and healthier food a proper need for service/assistance is provided in this case.

The fertilizer demands have grown firmly in 2016/17 by 2.4% (186 metric tonnes). It is still anticipated to grow steadily in the near future. Global fertilizer demand is entitled to grow by 1.5% per annum. India uses more fertilizers than in US, From the Standing Committee Report [held on August/2016] it is well evident that the fertilizer use has been increased along with the agricultural production.

  • The use of fertilizers has hiked from 1 million tonnes in the 1960s to 25.6 million tonnes in 2014. The consumption of chemical pesticides in the country has increased from 55,540 tonnes in 2010-11 to 57,353 tonnes in 2014-15.

It is proved that neither there is no permanent solution/assist to stop this overuse of synthetic materials. It is well documented that 56% (292 out of 525 districts) of districts in India use 85% of its fertilizer. If this exists, in the future (2050) India has to produce 300 million tonnes of food grains. It accounts for 45 million tonnes of fertilizers reach Indian soil creating a huge environmental and health problem. 

When this problem persists, it poses a huge passive/active impact on the soil, water, human health, and the allied sector. It is a huge issue, to some extent, it defines the nation’s economic and social wellbeing. This problem should have a promising and permanent solution, that reverts our soil back in the course of time.

Could IoT, Cloud and Remote sensing solve this problem?

Whatever the idea (now/future) our aim is to make farmers attain better and high-quality yields. We provide precision farming tools with the remote sensing application using also aerial images from satellite and drone.

  • Gathering data: As a preliminary step satellite image data plays the main role, we use multiple satellite data (from both public and private sectors) varying in spatial and temporal resolution. These images are calibrated and using AI the 99% of the clouds are removed to ensure the high quality of data over time.
  • Spectral Analysis: After gathering the data, we analyze them using the various spectral bands closely as possible (10 meters from its surface) using invisible spectral signatures. The spectral analysis includes Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Red Green Blue (RGB) maps, Modified Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI), Normalized Difference Red Edge Index (NDRE) for an efficient and accurate result.
  • Variable-rate prescription: Various reports based on the particular land vegetation is extracted, such as the fertilizer dosage, crop health analysis, and irrigation management are performed.
  • A web/mobile-based application is used to bring the data from satellite to the farmers. This is the platform through which farmers could request our on-demand services to their field.

When the farmers could able to access these services, they can get the accurate fertilizer dosage to their field reducing 30-40% of the fertilizer usage and increase the yields up to 5 % – 10 %. Intelligent crop health analysis could help in early detection and plan ahead. This centralized and on-demand solution could add value to the farmers in many possible ways reducing the harmful impacts that lay on our ecosystem

AI – IoT control measures: Our integrated AI system with on-field IoT sensing equipment is designed to monitor the fields, for precision agriculture and provide recommendations for a better yield and successful profit. AI-based recommender systems provide a detailed report on better crop yield vs several soil types, crop yield vs climate forecast, vs nutrients, vs harvesting conditions, and more. The system will tend to maximize the profit with zero wastage. We process remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) data. Landsat satellite data or data from several satellites orbiting us can provide real-time IR/Microwave energy and greenness of crops, leading to a better forecast on crop production and monitoring calamities like drought flooding, etc. Along with on-field sensing, we also offer a unique way of Arial drone system which can quickly analyze the crop health, nutrients, presence of diseases/weeds, fertilizer estimates.

  • Fertilizer & pesticide distribution: Drones are used to deliver fertilizer and pesticides effectively.
  • Pest detection: Drones having thermal imaging and acoustic, optical sensors to detect insects and rodents which destroy the crops.
  • Efficient Water delivery system: unlike other water irrigation systems our solution is adaptable to water-scarce regions. Our solution is to insert water pipes into the soil near the roots of the crops and release water droplets from time to time depending on the crop that way the water won’t get overused and can sustain in harsh regions. Since the pipes are placed inside the soil the heat effect is less causing less water to evaporate.
  • Agricultural land mapping: This is effective in the long term, we plan to map our entire nation according to provide farming statistics for everyone. For example, farmers can check which crops are growing, under what conditions, and where?

Our target customer and possible future plans

Our state-of-the-art remote sensing, cloud, and IoT based solution is mainly focused on farmers with the open agricultural ecosystem as for now. And this will possibly be developed and integrated with all the diverse farming like indoor agriculture, aquaculture, poultry farming, etc. Farmers are evolving and stay even more connected through the digital environment nowadays. Taking this as an advantage of our solution with the following features have a maximum probability to reach farmers hand.

  • We care about customer satisfaction very much: Apart from all the core services that our business holds we are going to focus more and more on customer obsession.
  • Easy and simple to use, available anywhere: Even though the architecture of our solution is complex and powerful at the backend, it provides the ease of use single API point in the farmer’s hand.
  • We promise an affordable solution: The cloud and edge computing are evolving day by day. With the commercial point of view cloud computing eliminate the need for software, computing hardware, IT, staff, infrastructure, and maintenance. This gives us a chance to provide our services at a possible low-cost.

Some Technologies/features used to solve some agriculturally based problems are:

SatSure: Satellite image processing, big data capabilities.

Fasal: Real-time weather forecast.

Aibono: Real-time precision agriculture as a service to farmers

Intello Labs: Deep learning, AI, and IoT.

SatSure, Fasal, Aibno, Intello Labs are the brands that have similar products and solutions. Although these companies offer real-time precision farming with AI and Satellite imaging as we do, they fail to provide an all-round picture and ease of use at the end.

That is, we offer more features, e.g., Variable fertilizer prescription, Arial monitoring, harvest intelligence, plant intelligence, food demand, nation mapping, and data gathering, an efficient water irrigation system.

Moreover, the companies lack an effective GTM (Go to Market) and a good business model. We offer an approach that will benefit the nation as a whole, the industries, communities, and even the stakeholders.

The agriculture market would be long sustainable. Farmers are greatly benefited, for instance, with our GTM strategy they can access peer-to-peer and no brokerage approach. The Nation will get real-time access to the crop data, organic products on the go like never before.

We focus mainly on efficiency, prescription, and suggestion in a way that all crops are grown depending on the demand and the farmers needing to use fewer fertilizers by crop rotation.

The IoT Worlds Solution Team can provide you the full support to develop your solution, contact us today.

Related Articles

Leave a Comment

WP Radio
WP Radio
OFFLINE LIVE