Role of IoT and its adoption in smart farming

Abstract

Despite the agricultural debts and loans are waived/or written off by various Govt, the access to institutional loan are limited especially to small and marginal farmers thereby forcing them to depend on money lender and agents. The share of farm income, which made up 74 per cent of rural incomes in the 1970s, has dropped to 30 per cent in 2010. Non-farm growth has been substantial in rural India. The popular view is that non-agricultural income, which accounts for a hefty 50 per cent of rural income, is more stable (and less volatile) than agricultural income. As there is no competition in agriculture, farmers are not benefiting from agriculture and hence, forcing them to depend on non-agricultural income. The alleviation of poverty may be a true challenge while majority of the population lives in rural area with the declining share of agriculture to the GDP. NSS employment data for 2007-08 and 2009-10 show clear evidence of an accelerated shift of rural laborer to non-agricultural work and it is not an undesirable development. While private investment in irrigation and water-saving devices did increase, the largest increase was in labour-saving mechanization. Labour saving mechanization helped farmers to cope up with labour scarcity and rising wages. The agriculture sector in India suffers from poor productivity due to falling water levels, expensive credit, a distorted market, the intermediaries, controlled prices, inadequate infrastructure, and poor quality of agriculture produce compared to the international standard. Crop farming in India is labor intensive and the farming even today follows the traditional and tacit methods being used over many centuries. Agriculture has also suffered because of farmers wholly depending on the monsoon, poor irrigation facilities, use of traditional practices, farmers’ poor economical status, fragmented landholdings, poor yields, lack of post-harvest infrastructure, not taking care of conservation resources and lack of farm extension. In order to mitigate the issues, ICAR has proposed in Twelfth Five Year Plan a number of new initiatives such as extramural funding for research, creation of funds for agroinnovations and agro-incubation, and setting up of an Agriculture Technology Forecast Centre (ATFC). The IoT frameworks can collect process and analyse data streams in real-time and facilitate provision of smart solutions designed to provide decision support in agriculture and help address some of the problems in agriculture. This paper briefly explains IoT principles and its architecture in agriculture, various off-the-shelf IoT applications readily available for deployment which enhances agricultural economy.