Internet of Things for Agriculture 4.0

Impact and Challenges

Rajesh Singh, Amit Kumar Thakur, Anita Gehlot, Ajay Kumar Kaviti, Rajesh Singh, Amit Kumar Thakur, Anita Gehlot, Ajay Kumar Kaviti

• Publisher: Apple Academic Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000369311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Sciences générales de l'informatique

This new book provides an insightful look at the varied and exciting uses and applications of Wi-Fi and the Internet of Things in agriculture. With internet-enabled communications becoming more widely available, farms and agricultural establishments can take advantage of these new technologies for a wide range of farm operations, such as crop management, farm vehicle tracking, livestock monitoring, storage monitoring, and more.

The collected data from these devices can be stored in the cloud system or server and accessed by the farmers via the internet or mobile phones. This book shows the many benefits to farmers from applying IoT, including better utilizing information for monitoring crops, optimizing water use, planning effective fertilization strategies, and saving time and reducing the operation expenses.

Topics include using IoT for vertical farming, IoT-based smart irrigation system, landslide susceptibility assessment, automated aeroponics systems, crop survival analysis, and more. The volume also considers the challenges of IoT in agriculture, such as the requirements of applications of wireless sensor networks, the threat of attacks and the detection of vulnerabilities in wireless sensor networks, and more.

Internet of Things for Agriculture 4.0: Impact and Challenges provides a better understanding of the time- and resourcing-saving benefits of wireless sensors and remote monitoring devices in agriculture. The volume will be useful for those involved in agricultural operations as well as scientists and researchers, and faculty and students in agriculture and computer and information science engineering.

CHAPTER 1 Vertical Farming Trends and Challenges: A New Age of Agriculture Using IoT and Machine Learning

MAHENDRA SWAIN*

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara, Punjab, India

*E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Vertical farming (VF) is a new age of agriculture technique. It has the potential to fulfill the food requirement in the future. Looking toward the current trend of agriculture, it seems to be that VF could enable all the vertices of farming in various dimensions. It is an unconventional way of agriculture to meet the food requirement as the farming lands are getting shirked day by day. Implementing cutting-edge technologies like IoT (Internet of things), AI (artificial intelligence), and machine learning, the productivity and quality factors would enhance VF. This chapter illustrates how advanced technology is integrated into the farming for overall growth of farmer and economy of a country. By deploying sensor nodes, farming monitoring is reliable and effective way to handle day-to-day activities in farming land.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The estimation tells that by 2050 there will be 9 billion population across the world. Most of the population is moving toward urban areas. As per study, in 2018, 800 million ha of land is based on soil-based agriculture. Gradually, the farming land is decreasing due to civilization of modern world.¹ As the population increases, the food demands will also increase. Whereas we do not have enough farming land to meet the food requirement, so this is the time to switch to unconventional way of agriculture, that is, vertical farming (VF), hydroponic, and aeroponic.² Adapting this kind of farming technology with the help of cutting-edge technologies like Internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) could be the revolutionary approach. VF is more reliable and suitable because it does not require soil and sunlight. It grows in vertical layers stacked one upon another. The closed ecosystem allows us to control all the activities inside this. Moreover, it can yield maximum from minimum area, more quality concerned.^3–5 The most advantage is it does get affected by environmental conditions and natural calamities. The uses of IoT would enable monitoring of the farms from a remote distance. A fully autonomous ecosystem will help the plant to grow precisely and full of nutrients. Although it does have so many advantages, there are various challenges in VF given in the following sections.

1.1.1 CHALLENGES IN VERTICAL FARMING

• Limited number of crops can be cultivated using VF
• Slow-growing plants like rice, paddy cannot be cultivated
• Deep-rooted plants like potato are not suitable
• High space–requiring plants such as corn is avoided in VF
• Lighting is another issue in this for photosynthesis purpose; plants require light with suitable amount of intensity (lux: unit of light intensity measurement)
• Efficient design architecture of VF
• Monitoring water and nutrients required for the plants
• Controlling HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system in closed ecosystem
• Recycling the waste

The abovementioned challenges are faced in VF.⁶ To overcome these challenges, it is necessary to adapt new technologies like automatic HVAC ecosystem using IoT and machine learning to select the crops that are suitable according to the nutrients requirement to grow healthy plants.⁷

1.2 VERTICAL FARMING ECOSYSTEM

Figure 1.1 shows the vertical farming plant. All the three images are the type of VF plants. There is also worldwide popularity of hydroponic farming.⁸ In Table 1.1, details of VF worldwide are given which shows the popularity of VF. It is different from traditional agriculture techniques.⁹

FIGURE 1.1 Examples of vertical farming.

Source: a) Photo by Valcenteu. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ b) Photo by Satoshi KINOKUNI - https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikunoki/38459770052/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ c) Photo by Benjamin D. Esham / Wikimedia Commons. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/deed.en

TABLE 1.1 Various Vertical Farming Ecosystem across Globe.

Sl. no.	Name	Location	Agriproducts	Size	Technology used
1	The Plant Vertical Farm	Chicago	Mushroom, bakery	1 Lakh ft^2	Aquaponics Hydroponic Natural sun source Recycling waste into energy
2	Sky Greens Farms	Singapore	Leafy green vegetables	600 m	Aeroponic system Low-carbon hydraulic driven
3	VertiCrop	Canada	Leafy greens and strawberries	16 ac	Fully automated with closed loop HVAC system Natural and artificial light source
4	Republic of South Korea VF	South Korea	Leafy green vegetables, almost wheat	450 m^2	Renewable resources like solar LED light source
5	Nuvege Plant Factory	Japan	Leafy greens vegetables	30,000 × 57,000 ft^2	Automated rack LED light source Hydroponics
6	AeroFarms	New Jersey	250 types of herbs such as kale and mizuna	20,000 ft^2 with 35 rows and 12 levels	LED light source Sensor tracking system for growing plant Recycle water techniques

The proposed system comprises the subimmerse sink node, LoRa gateway, cloud server as shown in Figure 1.2. Different environmental parameters like temperature, humidity, PH level, and fresh water are sent to the cloud server through LoRa communication module.¹⁰,¹¹ The subimmerse sink node transmits the data to the gateway node. The gateway node logs the data into the cloud server via Wi-Fi and also logs the data to local server via LoRa.¹² With the assistance cloud server, the user can access the data of hydroponic farming through mobile...