Smart Agriculture Sensors: Improving the Agriculture Yield

Farming is one of the occupations requiring most of the hard work. However, farming requires different kinds of activities and constant supervision, to result in healthy and high yields.

Starting from the first stage of crop production, farmers need to keep monitoring their crops to save them from various diseases and pests. These pests are one of the biggest reasons for the failure of crops.

Therefore, to make sure their crops are safe and healthy, farmers need to keep checking the growth of their crops and take necessary steps for healthy crop production. In early times, farmers used to walk in the field for monitoring, which used to consume a lot of time. Today, farmers are taking the help of advanced technology like sensors for the monitoring of crops more accurately and quickly.

Sensors are among the most widely used farming technologies for scanning the disease and pest in the crop more accurately.

What is an agriculture sensor?

A sensor refers to such devices which are capable of sensing and collecting information and transforming them into the required platform in real-time. With the enhancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, sensors are being applied in many sectors like agriculture.

In today’s agriculture sector, various sensors are being used for collecting data related to the crops, such as soil moisture, soil pH, humidity and air temperature, carbon dioxide, and light intensity.

The ongoing development of agricultural practices is smart farming. It is helping farmers in placing transmitters and sensors in all parts of their farming fields. These sensors can help monitor everything in the farming fields, from soil health to humidity levels. The information from such devices can be collected, studied, and utilized for enhancing the growing conditions of the crops more accurately.

With the help of sensor technology, the guesswork from agriculture can effectively be removed. Such integration techniques will help create the best agricultural practices that will improve crop production in the coming years.

Why prefer smart agriculture?

There are endless reasons farmers have started preferring smart agriculture over traditional. It allows farmers to collect and examine vast amounts of data related to crops quickly. Furthermore, it allows massive jumps in agriculture practices concerning yield sizes and efficiency. Lastly, it helps farmers in getting a better return of interest (ROI) and saving money from excess expenses.

With the help of information collected by the transmitters and sensors, it becomes easy to anticipate the outcomes of the farmer’s efforts which helps in reducing the waste and risk. The use of the agriculture sensors also helps to control irrigation remotely, which helps in reducing the over water bills and excess water wastage.

In addition to such benefits like monitoring of the crops, there are several other global reasons because of which farmers are adopting the practices of smart farming.

The world population is growing and is supposed to touch 9.6 billion by the year 2050. It means farmers need to increase and improve their yields by at least 50% to manage soaring demand. It can be possible only with the help of smart farming technologies like sensors.

Types of agriculture sensors:

Several sensors have been used for different purposes in the agriculture fields. Following are some of the agriculture sensors used by most.

• Location sensors: These sensors help in deciding the longitude, altitude, and latitude of the posting required in the area. To do so, location sensors take support from the GPS satellites.
• Optical sensor: These sensors are used for measuring the soil properties with the help of light. It is installed on drones, robots, or satellites determining the soil moisture contents.
• Electrochemical sensors: These sensors are used for collecting the chemical data in the soil by scanning the ions present in the soils. They deliver the information in the form of soil nutrients and pH levels.
• Airflow sensors: These types of sensors are used to measure air permeability. It is placed in a fixed position for use.

Benefits of agriculture sensors:

• They are developed to meet the rising food demands by maximizing yields with the use of fewer resources such as fertilizers, water, and seeds. So, with the help of the sensor, the food demands can be fulfilled by monitoring fields and conserving resources for producing more.
• These sensors are straightforward to be installed and easy to use.
• The price of the sensors is lower and affordable for farmers.
• The sensors are built with attached wireless chips for being controlled remotely.

Challenges of adopting agriculture sensors:

• For the constant use of the IoT and smart framing technology, internet connectivity is mandatory. In many places, such as India, it is not available.
• Less awareness about the use and benefits of the agriculture sensors among the farmers are one of the reasons, which many are not adopting the latest sensors technology.
• The absence of infrastructure requirements, like traffic systems, cellular towers, and smart grids, is a challenge, and it also slows down the growth of smart farming.

Insight of agriculture sensor market:

In 2020, the value of the agriculture sensor market was at $4.18 billion. As per the BIS Research report, the global agricultural sensors market is expected to touch $9.79 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 15.4%.

The sensors to grow are mechanical, humidity sensors, optical sensors, water sensors, soil sensors, and a few more. These sensors are widely used in the agriculture sectors for soil management, climate data, dairy management, and water management.

The North America region held the highest number of shares, approximately 24.0% in 2020. They are among the top contributing countries in the agriculture sensors market due to the presence of advanced technology.

Conclusion:

Agricultural sensors can be a great way of scanning the early threats to protect the crop from being wasted. The sensor technology is continuously getting improved and advanced. It can help in providing enough food for the growing population. In the coming years, the agriculture sensors will have a huge impact on the agriculture sectors for better crop productions.