IoT in Agriculture

The 'Farm to Fork Strategy' of the European Union

2023 Will Be Challenging for Agriculture

IoT in Agriculture

The digitization of agriculture is being driven forward by farmers. They are increasingly using agribots for area-specific precision farming and for soil monitoring with networked sensors. Automated monitoring of animal health is also being implemented with sensors.

Based on accurate crop data, farmers are moving from area-wide practices for seeding, fertilizing, weeding or irrigation to precision practices.

2023 Will Be Challenging for Agriculture

Agriculture in the European Union (EU)

The agricultural area of the EU corresponds to about 40 percent of the land area. The value of gross production of the agricultural sector of the economy amounted to 449.5 billion euros in 2021. This includes crop production (55.3 percent of the total value), livestock production (36.3 percent), agricultural services (4.8 percent), and non-agricultural goods and services (3.6 percent).

The average share of gross value added by agriculture in the EU's gross domestic product was only around 3.10 percent overall. These figures do not adequately reflect the great importance of agricultural businesses as suppliers to the food industry and as important employers, especially in rural regions.

Organic Farming

The EU's 'Farm to Fork Strategy' aims to achieve at least 25 percent of agricultural yields from natural substances and practices by 2030. So far, the EU-wide average is 9.1 percent.

Austria has the highest share of organic farming at 25.7 percent, followed by Estonia (22.4 percent) and Sweden (20.3 percent).

In Germany, sales of organic goods were just under 15.9 billion euros in 2022. This corresponds to 6.8 percent of the total food market.

The Trend Towards Consolidation in the Livestock Industry

In the last agricultural survey in 2020, there were about 5.3 million fewer farms in the EU than in 2005, a decline of 37 percent. In Germany, for example, the number of farms keeping pigs is declining.

In a ten-year comparison, the number of pigs fell by 24.7 percent or 7.0 million animals in 2022. The number of farms decreased by as much as 43.3 percent.

In chicken and laying hen husbandry, structural change is also leading to fewer and larger farms keeping poultry at several locations.

From 2005 to 2020, the area of land used for agriculture in the EU declined by 37 percent. More than 5 million farms have given up agricultural production.

Agricultural Challenge

8 million people live on Earth. In order to secure the food supply for all inhabitants, agricultural productivity must increase.

The global average temperature was around 1.15 degrees above the pre-industrial level.

Forecast: 2023 Will be a Difficult Year

Analysts fear that 2023 will be another difficult year for agriculture. The pressure to produce food more efficiently is increasing. At the same time, it is impossible to predict whether the growing season will be supplied with sufficient precipitation. World market prices for oil and gas are slowly falling with no sign of these positive changes reaching the EU. In addition, it is uncertain whether the supply chain problems from the past two years will persist.

Growing World Population

One of the biggest challenges of the coming decades is the growing world population. 8 million people currently live on Earth. The United Nations predicts 8.5 billion people by 2030 and 9.7 billion by 2050. Population growth has slowed recently. To ensure a food supply for all the world's inhabitants, agricultural productivity must increase.

Global Warming

Record temperatures have been measured every year since 2014. 2022 was one of the warmest years on record. The global average temperature was around 1.15 degrees above the pre-industrial level. As a result of global warming, the growing season is becoming longer. The increase in temperature leads to earlier budding, flowering and fruiting compared to earlier decades.

This circumstance is in itself welcome. However, the probability of heat and drought periods is increasing. In 2022, spring was too dry in most parts of Europe. In many cases, less than 80 percent, and in some cases 60 percent, of the normal precipitation value was measured, and locally even less. In many places, the drought continued into summer.

World Market Prices in Competition

Farmers face higher production costs and falling prices in 2023. Crop protection products have increased in price by 24 percent in 2022. Fungicides cost just under 10 percent more. Prices for oil (up to 9 percent) and gas (up to 47 percent) have also risen sharply. Speculation in agricultural commodities alongside the production of agrofuels is one of the most important causes of agricultural price explosions. The increased prices lead to a drastic drop in demand. Dairy farmers are particularly affected by low demand.

Unreliable Supply Chains

Global commodity markets were greatly challenged by the pandemic. Lockdowns, border closures, supply bottlenecks, shortages of truck drivers – all these factors led to a stockpiling of raw materials, resulting in a collapse in demand. Worldwide, production is now starting up again. However, the resulting production gap means a continuing shortage of important goods.

Agriculture 3.0

Farmers need to become more efficient and productive while cutting costs. The intelligent networking of people, animals and equipment is the way forward.

Digitalization in Agriculture

Agricultural technology sees itself as responsible for maintaining the quality of agricultural cultivation, increasing efficiency and conserving resources at the same time. Farmers are driving the digitization of agriculture. They are increasingly using agribots for area-specific precision farming and for monitoring soils with networked sensors. Automated monitoring of animal health is also being implemented with sensors.

Precision Farming & Precision Livestock Farming

Based on accurate crop data, farmers are moving from area-wide methods of seeding, fertilizing, weeding or irrigating to precise methods. The exact location for material application is determined using drones or GIS data. Networked equipment, such as a seeder, sprayer or fertilizer spreader, is told exactly where to apply products and in what quantities.

Precision saves money and reduces the pollutant load on soils. The counterpart to this in animal husbandry is the monitoring of animals with tracking collars and sensors.

Data on body temperature, food intake, diseases and more allow people to see the health and nutritional status of animals and ensure their healthy growth with precise interventions.

Smart Irrigation

The combination of remote soil and weather monitoring with automatic irrigation control systems ensures efficient irrigation. Research shows that water savings of 30-50 percent can be achieved. Irrigation is precisely matched to crop needs. Yields in the fields are increased and costs reduced by using water resources more sustainably and sparingly.

Agribots

Agribots are autonomous and semi-autonomous robots for use in agriculture. Unmanned tractors, weeders, planters, picking robots and drones are among them. An unmanned tractor and smart planter can reduce a farmer's costs by 60 percent. A weed whacker, for example, first identifies weeds via a camera. It then destroys it either through the targeted application of an herbicide or with an electrical shock. Drones perform an important function as they fly patrols, collecting data on plants and animals.

An agribot with gripper arms tending lettuce plants in the greenhouse.

Fodder is pushed to the cows at specific times on predefined routes by a fully automatic feed pusher.

IoT Components

An Overview of IoT Networks

The IoT application commonly used in agriculture is based on wireless sensor networks. It consists of the following components: sensors, sensor nodes, radio transmission and data processing. Possible variants include RFID and remote sensing services as the basis for data.

The Most Important Components: Sensors

The most common measurement fields for IoT sensors are temperature, humidity, soil moisture and irrigation status. Biosensors are used in animal monitoring and measure antibodies, enzymes, nucleic acids or specific cells. Recent developments in sensor technology point towards embedded, intelligent, integrated and miniaturized sensors.

With sensor data, farmers develop an understanding of the interactions in their fields and livestock. In a second step, productivity can then be increased through optimized operations based on the sensor data.

Connectivity and Data Transmission

The information from the sensors is transmitted to sensor nodes from where it is further transmitted. Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN), WLAN, BLE, Zigbee or LoRaWAN are possible transmission technologies. All transmission methods are currently already in use.

Researchers predict that the main direction of agricultural sensor networks in the future will be LPWAN (represented by LoRa and NBIoT). LPWAN will be complemented by 4G and 5G to enable the transmission of large files such as agricultural images and audio files.

Sensors

Temperature
Soil condition
Air humidity
Soil moisture
Irrigation
Air pressure
Light
pH value