The Future of Farming through the Internet of Things Perspective in a new whitepaper by Libelium and Beecham Research
Developing Smart Agriculture with IoT technologies is a must if, according to the FAO of the UN, by 2050 worldwide food production should increase by 70% to feed 9.6 billion people. Libelium and Beecham Research are increasing and spreading the knowledge on Smart Agriculture as one of the key applications in the IoT market with the publication of a white paper offering a deep insight on how wireless sensor networks can impact in reducing crop loses and increasing production.
The agriculture industry has to face several challenges such as the limited availability of arable land, the global climate change, the growing scarcity of water, the restrictions on fertilizing uses, the price and availability of energy and the impact of urbanisation on rural labour supply.
Precision agriculture, based on sensor technologies, deals with this matters by providing real-time monitoring in the crops and predictive models to anticipate to any danger that may occur in the plots. Different parameters such as speed and wind direction, pluviometer, temperature, solar radiation or soil moisture can be measured.
Libelium has wide experience operating on Smart Agriculture with the most interactive platform Waspmote Plug & Sense! Smart Agriculture. The company has deployed important worldwide projects with different partners, cloud companies and communication protocols. The new white paper resumes the most interesting success stories like predicting vineyard conditions in Slovenia and Switzerland; preventing pest in olives, increasing tobacco crops quality and reducing strawberries time to market in Italy; improving cocoa production in Indonesia; and preventing environmental impact in waste water irrigation for a meet industry in Australia.
“Small farmers and large landowners need help to approach and understand the potential of the IoT market by installing smart technologies to increase sustainability and competitiveness in their productions. The returns on investment that can be achieved by installing smart agriculture solutions are amazing”, says Alicia Asín, CEO of Libelium.
White paper’s author, Saverio Romeo, states that “analysing the solutions of the IoT market for agriculture, Libelium offers the most interoperable technology and the easiest solution to deploy and mantain”.
Smart Agriculture out-of-the-box IoT kit
Libelium, through The IoT Marketplace, facilitates the access to develop new IoT solutions for Agriculture market with an out-of-the-box kit that enables to monitor environmental parameters in farming, vineyards, greenhouses or golf courses. It includes soil moisture sensors to control irrigation water, and humidity and temperature sensors to prevent fungus and other microbial contaminants.
The kit is also equipped with sensors such as atmospheric pressure, leaf wetness, WS-300 (anemometer+ wind vane + pluviometer) and solar radiation. Developers and System Integrators use this kit to make Proof of Concepts to test business cases before going for massive deployments.
