Husnain
Indonesian Centre for Agricultural Land Resources Research Development, Ministry of Agriculture Jl. Tentara Pelajar No. 12, Kampus Cimanggu, Bogor, Indonesia Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Abstract
In simple words, modern farming means using modern technologies, techniques, and science to increase farming production while decreasing environmental impact. We are now, in the modern era which required modern techniques for agriculture too. In this modern era, many terms are used to express smart farming, precision farming, and digital farming that refer to modern farming. The use of the term must be carefully considered with real conditions**.**
Precision agriculture is referred to as precision farming or precision agriculture. The easiest way to understand precision agriculture is when it comes to the growing of crops and raising of livestock using technology to make it more accurate, optimized and controlled. The technology used in this precision agriculture is ranging from automated hardware and software, autonomous vehicles, drones, GPS guidance, robotics, sensors, soil sampling, and telematics.
The key factor in this precision agriculture is optimization. For example, instead of applying an equal amount of fertilizer in the field, precision farming required site-specific fertilizer adjusting soil variations, and other factors. This technology leads to optimization on the use of fertilizer, cost saving, and environmentally friendly. The most useful trend of technology to support precision agriculture are mobile devices, access to high-speed internet, low-cost and reliable satellite communications, positioning and imagery, and farm equipment.
Digital Farming is another term used to respect the value of the data supporting precision farming. Digital agriculture is integrating both concepts of precision farming and smart farming. For farmers, digital agriculture allows for the opportunity to increase their farm’s production, cost saving and eliminate risks. We will not be able to implement precision farming without the readiness of digital information of the farm and all related factors.
In the end, the term used in complex modern agriculture which is Smart Farming. In concept, Smart Farming is applying information and data technologies for optimizing complex farming systems. The most important factor is access to data and how farmers can use the collected information intelligently. The final goal is to increase the quality and quantity of agricultural products while optimizing human labour production. Or, in simple words, producing more food with less investment of resources with the same amount of land.
The technology used in the smart farming range from the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, drones, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). With these tools, farmers and operators can monitor field conditions without going to the field. This enables them to make decisions for the whole farm, small or large areas. Smart farming is not only for large agricultural corporations, but also very useful to support small-scale farms, family farms, organic farms, and other smaller operations.
To apply smart farming which is software-managed and sensor-monitored, we need support from other experts with different field backgrounds. The expert required as like computer science, communication engineering, civil engineering, automatization, robotics, sensors, Big Data management, and other related fields. With this new paradigm, smart agriculture will be very attractive to the young generation. This could be a solution to the decreasing number of workers in the agricultural sectors.
In applying smart farming, there are several levels that exist recently. In large-scale, agricultural companies, smart technology in supporting the operations of farms is established. Also in some medium and small agricultural industries. However, small farms are shifting from traditional farming to modern smart farming unstoppable. Due to the limited infrastructure of communication technology and less access to Big Data in agriculture, the transformation of traditional will go up a certain level like the use of devices to check soil pH, and mobile devices to find planting calendar and their soil information. Mobile devices are now widely used to control water irrigation in small-scale farm.
Our big challenge in smart agriculture is information on soil content, moisture, nutrient trends, and weather systems down to any square foot of land are a few of the data points available to farmers with today’s technology. Thus, all those data need to integrating into software used in marketing, forecasting, and production. This is the future goal that we need to work on together and integrated. We believe that IoT will be a real game-changer in our future agriculture and the overall food chain that will drastically improve productivity and sustainability.