IOT Technology applied to agriculture

The exponential advance of telecommunications, electronics and mechatronics are generating the emergence of emerging disruptive technologies such as robotics, IoT, Virtual Assistants, Artificial Intelligence, among others. All of which impact the way they relate to each other:

• People with people
• People with companies
• Companies with companies

The impact of these emerging technologies is present in all economic sectors, and agriculture is of course no stranger to them; it is now common to hear terms such as agriculture 4.0 or precision agriculture.

But ¿what is precision agriculture or agriculture 4.0? It is a way to improve crop productivity through the use of IoT technology (sensors) and Air Technologies (Drones) which will allow the collection of structured or unstructured data such as videos, photos, text, among others, allowing real-time and proactive decision making on the situation of the crop, whether intensive or extensive.

The implementation and development of IoT and airborne technologies (drones) in the agriculture sector often defines three layers:

1)Sensing layer (data capture or collection): the sensing layer refers to the hardware and software components associated with IoT and drone technology, which groups elements such as sensors, actuators, transceivers, embedded systems, radio frequency technologies and different monitoring elements.

2) Network layer (Transport): The network layer integrates elements that allow the transfer of information coming from certain components of the perception layer and incorporates different communication protocols, which are implemented through telecommunication networks and sensor nodes.

The network layer contains communication network technologies such as: LORA, XBEE, SIGFOX, GPS. And protocols such as: ZIGBEE, WIFI, BLUETOOTH, GSM, 6LOWPAN.

3) Application layer (Implementing data availability and intelligence generation): The layer is referred to as the implementation of IoT developments through expert systems or involving intelligent algorithms for decision making about crops.

Finally, the benefits that can be obtained from the use of such technologies in agriculture are mainly:

• Increased crop productivity
• Generates efficiencies in crop management.
• Improves the decision-making process by having consolidated real-time information and crop status alerts.
• Reduced impact on the environment
• Reduces the use of chemicals
• Reduces costs
• Enables specialized remote support
• Low initial investment