Cloud-based approach for tracking and monitoring of hay bales in smart agriculture

Abstract

The introduction of new technology to agriculture has resulted in enormous amounts of data and their handling and utilization challenge. Data is typically gathered from several sources such as field sensors, machines, industrial processes, different laboratories and officials. This has led to several complicated systems that are not always compatible. Farmers are confused, unaware, and face challenges in seeing the benefits for their business in relation to the time required. This paper introduces an automatic digital tracking and monitoring system for round feed bales on farms. In this system, bale data from sensors, switches, and a GPS-device in the baling machine are collected by hardware and sent to the cloud with the bale ID read from a RFID tag attached to each bale. A digital inventory of bales forms instantly, and baling can be followed on the map application with a mobile device. Data in the cloud is utilized for the farmer's user interface. The farmer can manage and do various operations with bales. An important outcome is the yield report, showing basic statistics, quantities, and qualities of bales in a digitalized field parcel. If the farmer wants to sell bales, this can easily be done with the tool. It makes sales by connecting the farmer to an e-commerce portal. A key question and challenge to be resolved involves who owns the data. All the benefits of digitalization can be achieved only with good cooperation and mutual agreement from farmers who want to have control of their data under all circumstances.