Geo-monitoring Tools to Improve Nutrition
Food and Nutrition
3 min readA technology to improve nutrition using precision agriculture
Precision Agriculture is a farm management approach that uses the internet of things (IoT) and advanced communication tools to ensure continuous monitoring of crops resulting in optimum productivity. Precision Agriculture has become an inevitable part of attaining sustainable farming and ingredient sourcing. The application of geo-monitoring tools helps growers locate the farms, soil nutrients, water requirements, temperature mapping, rain gauge, among other parameters.
Modern Farming Practices
IoT and advanced sensors help to monitor farming parameters and provide accurate estimations on crop yields and nutrition
Agriculture monitoring is an essential factor in achieving food security. There is a pressing need to record real-time farm information like soil moisture, temperature, and pH. It is critical to prepare for disruptions in food supply and global crop market price fluctuations to keep on the pulse for food security.
One of the vital differences between old-fashioned and modern farming practices is collecting farming data. In traditional farming practices, farmers used visual evaluation to take relative and subjective decisions, which is now directly from the crops by quantitative data producing objective decisions. Remote monitoring of soil using the Internet of Things (IoT) helps real-time tracking of factors such as pH, temperature, moisture, micronutrients, and related parameters essential for farming practices for nutritious crops.
There are immense opportunities to explore emerging technologies such as IoT, cloud computing, robotics, GIS, and remote sensing in the agricultural domain. The potential categories for future application of smart farming practices include:
- Agriculture sensors to track the soil parameters
- Cloud Integration for real-time alerts and continuous communication and open platforms for data accumulation
Agriculture 5.0, proximal sensing of farms, help create maps of plant water status and crop yield status for improved nutrition
Proximal sensing, detecting farming parameters by placing the sensor near the plants – less than 2m, provides data directly through ground-based platforms. The technology utilizes active sensors to map sunlight, illumination, soil nutrients, plant status, pests, disease control status, among other things.
In 2018, a group of researchers successfully used crewless farm vehicles (unmanned ground vehicle – UGV) for weed control, field scouting, and harvesting. Additionally, the experiments demonstrated successful integration and application of field scouting robots to reduce the production cost, increase crop productivity and quality, and enable customized plant and crop treatments.
Exhibit 1 illustrates the UGV –VineScout and data mapping to provide insights to the farmers.
Real-time, continuous monitoring of agriculture crops and soil health enables accurate forecasting of crop yields and weather forecasts, thus providing precise reading on the commodity prices and possible risks in the food supply, reducing global food insecurity.
Technology integration can potentially enhance data collection, real-time insights, and process automation using low-cost agriculture sensors, GPS tracking, and IoT platforms. The farming and agriculture industry can benefit through the implementation of the integration. Farmers with AgTech and F&B corporates are collaborating with technology developers to explore the geo-monitoring tools.
Additionally, smart agriculture solutions can help map crop yield and nutrition, which is vital to overcome the growing concern of the global population’s food consumption and environmental footprint.
References
- From Smart Farming towards Agriculture 5.0: A Review on Crop Data Management
- An IoT Based System for Remote Monitoring of Soil Characteristics
- Mini-paper – Monitoring of soil-borne pathogens (fungi, protists, and nematodes) and soil tests
- Research and development in agricultural robotics: A perspective of digital farming
