By Hari Prashanth, Technical Director of Lava Labs
With the world’s population having crossed the seven billion mark and expected to increase by another three billion over the next five decades, the world’s necessity for food is bound to increase rapidly. This has resulted in farmers the world over searching for ways to maximize their agriculture returns.
In the past farmers had to rely on television, newspaper and radio stations for market and weather reports which played a vital role in agriculture because appropriate environmental conditions are necessary for optimum plant growth, improved crop yields, and efficient use of water and other resources.
Today, cloud computing has become an important agriculture management tool. Hydroponics and greenhouse cultivation are examples of agriculture that require involvement of computers to monitor factors such as lighting, feeding, temperature, acidity and basicity.
Recent advances in sensors and data acquisition technologies and their integration with the cloud platform allows development and application of sensor system for agriculture. By automating the data acquisition process of soil conditions and various climatic parameters that govern plant growth information can be collected at high frequency with less labour requirements which in turn reduces cost. The system is designed to keep the user, which in this case are the farmers, continuously informed of the conditions in the farm.
Irrigation, the process of watering crops at regular intervals, is one of the major problems faced in monitoring the conditions of the seeded lands. To get the maximum output through irrigation, the plants must always be kept in optimum condition. Unfortunately, most farmers are unable to monitor the conditions on a daily/hourly basis or the data that they acquire through manual labor is inaccurate. Not to mention it is cost inefficient as well.
This particular problem can be solved by using a centralized monitoring system which can accurately acquire certain conditions of the land through the use of sensors, drones and cameras. While the initial cost to deploy the system is comparatively high, it’s evened out in the long run by reducing manual labor costs and by also providing accurate representation of physical conditions of the land.
Cloud computing provides high capacity data storage and data mining tools to process data in a larger scale which can be accessed in real time from anywhere. The data collected by sensors, drones and cameras on factors such as crop condition, weather, market, pesticides and prescriptions can all be easily stored on cloud. Farmers can then store and retrieve these information from anywhere without physically being at the farms.
The infrastructure of cloud also makes it the best platform for researchers from various agriculture related institutions to share and collaborate with the farming community about newly developed agricultural techniques and tools. It can even be used for the sharing of mutual information and experiences among the farming community across the globe. Farmers can check on market conditions of various crops when making decisions on what type of crop to opt for. Similarly weather forecast can be integrated directly to intelligent farming systems to better instruct on the behaviours of supply.
Modernising the agricultural industry with the joint use and collaboration of smart sensors and cloud computing may just prove to be the answer needed to innovate and streamline agricultural efficiency to better meet the increasing demands of humanity around the world.
Lava Labs brings together innovation and technology, combined with expertise and deep understanding of businesses and their needs by engaging with industry leaders to empower organizations.