Information technology for sustainable agriculture

Abstract

Feeding global population by 2050 requires 60% increase in the agricultural production. Agricultural transformation has a role to play for food security, poverty reduction and economic growth. However, sustainability and climate risk management are the challenges. The recent advancements in information technology (I. T) delivered smart devices, computing and sensor technologies. Application of those smart technologies have the potential to enable agricultural industry meets its productivity and sustainability challenge as well as solving indigenous agricultural problems of the developing nations. The geospatial data archives and real-time data from satellites, UAVs, RFIDs in combination with weather data, digitized soil data, and other real-time data streams coming from in-situ smart sensors can now give us a better understanding of the interaction between crops, weather and soils than ever before. Further the analytics of that big data assisted by machine learning can provide decision support in this regard. The customized I. T packages are required where, e-farm production system based on precision agriculture techniques, crops and livestock management, precision irrigation applications, crop water and pest/disease management, wireless moisture sensing networks, wireless communication in UAVs used for vegetation health detection, rainfall monitoring system based on mobile communication data, cloud services for knowledgebase on soils, nutrients, yields by making soil, nutrient and yield maps and disseminating through mobile networks and variable rate application based on GPS and GIS systems. Every passing day, the use of internet and smartphones is enhancing rapidly. The cloud-based services for big data analytics in agriculture and data sharing apps with linkages to integrated platforms and models are the future of farming in both modern and developing world.