As the world’s population is exponentially growing, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that the world needs to produce about 70% more food in the year 2050 with the depletion of available natural resources and utilizing agricultural land.
Nonetheless, the scarcity of natural resources such as pristine water and arable land with limited yield in numerous staple crops has aggravated the problem. Smart farming is an emerging concept that is used to manage farms by using advanced data analytics and AI tools such as drones, artificial intelligence, and robots, and thereby helps to increase the quality and quantity of products by utilizing human labor that is required for production. In simple words, smart farming helps in managing farms by incorporating modern communication and information technologies and bringing efficiency to labor work. In the present context, this kind of farming uses software, connectivity, locations, sensors, robotics, and data analytics in order to operate them in the real field. Undoubtedly, agriculture solely contributes about one-third of the GDP in Nepal and offers an employment opportunity of about 74% of the economy to its active population. With half of the agricultural producers of the country being transitioned to the commercial efforts and products being conserved through community seed banks and plant genetic resources, they need to be scaled up as an idea to intensify the country’s limited land of agriculture. In fact, most farmers happen to grow a variety of crops in order to hedge against challenging weather and other uncertainties that invite an agronomic condition. The precision agriculture market continues to evolve, allowing farmers to embrace data-driven solutions. While the future opportunities for data analytics in agriculture is limitless, there are already strong benefits emerging. Therefore, some of the ways in which we can develop smart farming in Nepal using Data Analytics and AI are elaborated below;
Monitoring climate conditions
Perhaps the prominent agriculture gadgets are farming sensors and weather stations that are located across the field and collect quantifiable data used for smart farming. So, the first way to develop smart farming in Nepal would be to monitor the condition of the climate using data analytics and collecting data from the environment, and sending it to the cloud. Likewise, the measurement of the climate conditions is very useful for crop allocation and taking the right actions to improve capacity. Some of the examples that Nepalese smart farming can practice using IoT devices are Smart Elements, Pycno, and allMETEO.
Automation of Greenhouse
In Nepal, farmers use manual effort to balance the environment of the greenhouse, but using technological sensors helps them to find real-time information about the condition of the greenhouse. It can be estimated by measuring temperature, soil condition, lightning, and humidity. Also, to add to the sourcing of data related to the environment, farmers can install weather stations that will eventually help them to adjust the relentless conditions to match the given parameters of the farm. Well, we can also refer to Growlink and farmapp which is an IoT agricultural products that deliver such services to the farmers. In addition, GreenIQ is another enticing product that can be used by our farmers to remotely control lighting and irrigation system.
Using agricultural drones
One of the promising ways to develop smart farming in our country would be using drones which are also regarded as better equipped than satellites and airplanes in order to collect agricultural data. Also, apart from the capabilities of the drone to look into the crop field, drones enable farmers to accomplish several tasks that were previously managed by the laborers such as fighting pests, planting, watering, crop monitoring, and others.
With the growing incorporation of the Data Analytics and AI in every aspect of our life from fitness to home automation to logistics and automation, it is most logical to apply it in the agricultural sector tremendously improves the productivity of a farm. Also, farming in developing countries has seen multiple numbers of advancements in technology in the past few decades as they are switching to more technology-driven and industrialized agriculture. So, by using numerous smart agricultural gadgets, farmers even in Nepal have attained better control over the livestock and crops making more efficient yields. Likewise, the scenario of the video entails some of the areas in which farmers face problems and challenges while working in the agricultural fields followed by the solutions and enabled technologies that are mostly used to incorporate IoT in their quotidian tasks. Therefore, with absolute operations and the incorporation of technological tools, farmers can produce an abundance of crops that are essential for present and upcoming days.
