Old MacDonald Had a Farm 1 0 1 0 1

If you sang the title of this article in your head when you read it, give yourself a gold star if it went something like, "Old MacDonald had a farm, one zero one zero one." Big corporate agricultural farms have long been using fancy machinery and computerized systems to manage their crops and herds. Now, with a booming Internet of Things (IoT) market on the rise, even local and rural farmers can benefit from the dawning of a smart-farming revolution. Even without the Internet, farmers can still deploy a well-planned infrastructure to track and manage many aspects of their farms. The technology is out there to automate, increase, and enhance modern farming techniques and practices, so let us break it down.

There are generally five ways IoT can improve return-on-investment for agriculture, which of course can be, and has been, abstracted into just about any other field:

• Collecting massive amounts of data, using intelligent sensors around the farm

• Maintaining tighter control over internal farm processes to lower risk

• Reducing the farm's operational waste, and thus costs, thanks to tighter control

• Decreasing administrative overhead by using automated business processes

• Enhancing overall product quality and output volume

Once we have a good grasp on what IoT can do for farming, we can pivot and look at examples of some agricultural IoT use cases:

• Managing and detecting soil quality

• Monitoring and managing cattle

• Weather monitoring and forecasting of conditions

• Automating greenhouse and hothouse operations

• Drones for crop and herd monitoring

• Precision application of herbicides, pesticides, and other industrial chemicals

• Integrated and end-to-end management of farming workflows

• Real-time data analytics and forecasting

After developing use cases for these often tiny and low-power devices that comprise an IoT environment, there are still several technical considerations for smart-farms and smart-farmers to account for:

1. The Hardware - What brand or brands of equipment, and do they mesh well?

2. The Brain - What kind of central nervous system will this require?

3. The Maintenance - Who will do the hardware, firmware, and software maintenance?

4. The Mobility - Where does the farm end and the office begin?

5. The Infrastructure - How resilient does it all have to be?

6. Connectivity - Is the Internet necessary, or will just an internal network suffice?

7. Data Collection Frequency - How often will the systems poll the IoT devices for new data?

8. Data Security - Where and how will the resulting data be stored?

Bringing an entire farm, or even a few aspects of a whole farm, into the Internet-age is no easy lift. As technologies evolve and continue to get lighter and use less power, farmers will have even greater control over the world's food production. All of this leads to a reduction in costs and a greater return on investment. Still, the ancillary benefits are also good for the environment in terms of reduced chemical runoff, reduced waste, and better conditions for our food to be growing in. For more information, watch this YouTube video from Bill Gates, filmed at Dancing Crow Farm, where they piloted a project called “FarmBeats” to bring more data to the table for better farms and better farmers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCIohEJYxdY