Professional Editing and Project Writing

GLS51004

(Integrated Task on Writing Research article)

Title: Smart Agriculture

Name: Sreepriya Edamapaati

Roll Number: 22112351

2023-2024
 SMART AGRICULTURE

Abstract:

Agriculture is regarded as one of the most crucial sectors in guaranteeing food security.
However, as the world’s population grows, so do agri-food demands, necessitating a shift
from traditional agricultural practices to smart agriculture practices, often known as
agriculture 4.0. It is critical to recognize and handle the problems and challenges related
with agriculture 4.0 in order to fully profit from its promise. As a result, the goal of this
research is to contribute to the development of agriculture 4.0 by looking into the growing
trends of digital technologies in the field of agriculture. A literature review is done to
examine the scientific literature pertaining to crop farming published in the previous decade
for this goal. This thorough examination yielded significant information on the existing state
of digital technology in agriculture, as well as potential future opportunities.

Food security is a multifaceted notion that aims to eliminate hunger by Assuring a steady
supply of nutritious food. It is defined by a four-pillar paradigm, each of which is necessary
to provide food security [1]. Food security Is becoming a severe global concern as a result of
anthropogenic factors such As rapid population expansion, urbanization, industrialization,
farmland loss, Freshwater scarcity, and environmental degradation. Smart Agriculture: Every
industry is being revolutionized and reshaped by Industry 4.0. It’s a Strategic initiative that
combines emerging disruptive digital technologies like The Internet of Things (IoT), big data
and analytics (BDA), system integration (SI), cloud computing (CC), simulation, autonomous
robotic systems (ARS), Augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), wireless sensor
networks (WSN), cyber-physical systems (CPS), digital twin (DT), and additive manufacturing
(AM) to enable the digitization of the industry [7]. Agriculture 4.0, also known as smart
agriculture, smart farming or digital Farming [7], is the next phase of industrial agriculture,
fueled by the integration of these technologies in agriculture. Farmers can use smart
agriculture to Address a variety of agricultural food production concerns such as farm A
typical agri-food value chain displaying three key stages in the production Of agricultural
products: pre-field (pre-plantation stage), in-field (plantation and Harvesting stage), and
post-field (post-harvesting stage). All of the stages are Important in the value chain, but in
this examination, we will focus on the second stage, in-field, which includes numerous
cropgrowing operations such as Ploughing, sowing, spraying, and harvesting, among others.
Traditional agricultural approaches are now used in these procedures, which are
laborintensive, Require arable land, time, and a significant quantity of water (for irrigation),
and Make it difficult to produce enough food [5]. A part of the problem is also due To the
improper application of pesticides and herbicides. play
1. Smart farming cycle:

Smart agriculture technology based on the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has many
advantages related to all agricultural processes and practices in real-time, which include
irrigation and plant protection, improving product quality, fertilization process control, and
disease prediction, etc.
The advantages of smart agriculture can be summarized as follows:
1) Increasing the amount of real-time data on the crop,
2) Remote monitoring and controlling of farmers,
3) Controlling water and other natural resources,
4) Improving livestock management,
5)Accurate evaluation of soil and crops; 6)Improving
agricultural production.
This work aims to review published articles on the techniques above with regards to smart
farming, in addition, highlight some approaches to smart farming in developing countries

2. The main pillars and methods of smart farming

The current work considered a large number of research topics to explore scientific methods
relating to smart farming. Consequently, this work covered many aspects regarding the
agricultural practices, decision-making, and technologies involved. We have used several
sources from various scientific publishers such as Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, MDPI, etc. The
sources varied from books, book chapters, conference proceedings, and articles, in addition
to research project reports. Thus, this work has relied on 58 published documents, most of
which were published during the last three years, and the authors from different countries
worldwide. Meanwhile, a particular focus was dedicated to some smart agriculture
approaches in the Africa continent. Subsequently, the review highlights the main
components of smart farming, such as IoT, the role of internet connection, and smart
sensing.

3. IoT in smart agriculture

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an intelligent and promising technology that offers
unconventional and practical solutions in many areas, as shown in Fig. 2, such as smart cities,
smart homes, traffic control, healthcare, smart agriculture, etc. In the agricultural field, IoT
technology has made significant development in agricultural management. This technology
allows all agricultural devices and equipment is to be linked together to make the
appropriate decision in irrigation and fertilizer supply . The smart systems enhance the
accuracy efficiency of devices that monitoring plant growth and even raising livestock.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used to collect data from different sensing devices. In
addition, cloud services are also essential to be integrated with IoT to analyze and process
the remote data that facilitates decision-making to implement the best decisions . Smart
farm management requires using ICT, ground sensors, and control systems installed on
robots, autonomous vehicles, and other automated devices. The success of smart systems
depends on high-speed internet, advanced mobile devices, and satellites to provide (images
and positioning). succeed used IoT real-time to track and diagnose leaf diseases that
obstruct crop growth using many satellite images and sensors positioned in farms (paddy
and banana crops); this system helped to be analyzed the data and made the decision then
sent back to the farmers Via the webserver.

Application of IoT in different areas :

According to the report of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO 2017), about 20–40%
of crops are lost annually due to pests and diseases and as a result of lack of good
monitoring of the state of the crop. Hence, the use of sensors and smart systems allows
monitoring of weather factors, fertility status, and also determining the exact amount of
fertilizers necessary for crop growth. The excessive use of fertilizers has adverse effects on
soil fertility. Farooq et al. (2020) surveyed 67 research papers that published through 2006 to
2019 on the use of IoT in different agricultural applications; they noted that about 16% of
the research papers were on precision agricultural and also 16 % on irrigation
monitoring,13% on soil monitoring, 12% on temperature, Animal monitoring and Humidity
monitoring were 11% for each, air and diseases monitoring were 5% for each in addition to
water monitoring was 7 %. Finally, fertilization monitoring was only 4% of the research
papers .
4. 5G network on smart farming:
Parallel with the development in smart systems, communication and information technology
has also undergone significant development in the few years. During the past ten years, the
3G / 4G / NB-IoT wireless network technology provides an adequate speed for transmitting
information and communication, is used to connect smart devices through the IoT to share
data for accurate evaluation in the agricultural field. However, with the development in the
quantity and quality of information, the efficiency of the 4G network has decreased, as the
data transmission has become weak compared to before that. The 5G network expresses the
evolution of the fifth-generation communication networks to provide a very high speed to
transform data in low time . The data transfer using the 5G network is faster than other
networks as it increases by nearly 100 times in download and upload speeds in the 4G
network. This means downloading a 2-hour movie would take less than four seconds on 5G
compared to 6 min on 4G. in addition, 5G network characterized by 10Gbps, the downlink
rate is 20Gbps .

There are many advantages of using a 5G network in smart applications as follows:

● High data transfer capacity, low latency

● Very high connection density compared to another network.

● Spectral efficiency improvement.

● Smooth communication performance.
 ● Extensive coverage.

● High efficiency of network energy.

The spatial distribution map shows that the United States, Canada, some countries in
Europe, Australia, China, and Japan are the countries that use the 5G network around the
world, as shown in . Studies show that about 80% of the rural population in the UK is still
outside the 4G band, which affects the application of advanced smart technology in rural
areas (USDA, 2019).

Spatial distribution map of 5G:

In 2017, 5G was used for the first time in smart farming applications such as crop harvesting,
fertilization, pesticides, and seed operations through autonomous tractors and drones. In
addition, 5G has positive impacts on the agricultural sector where improve severs
agricultural operations such as drone control, interactive real-time monitoring, seeding
operations, pesticide, and fertilizer spraying, artificial intelligence robots, and data analytics
Fig. 5.
5. Smart sensing for agriculture
Sensors are responsible for measuring and monitoring all factors in the smart system; for
example, soil health monitoring has special sensors such as nutrients contents, phosphate
contents, soil moisture, and compaction and so on. The smart irrigation system included
many sensors for monitoring water levels, irrigation efficiency, climate sensors, etc. The
sensors can measure and monitor the changes in soil and yield properties and local weather
on-farm sites. So, the sensors can gather the different data to be used for the analysis of the
farm statutes and for making a suitable decision. These smart sensors monitor the variation
in soil, crop, livestock health, in addition, contribute to enhance the agricultural product in
terms of quantity and quality. The standard sensors used in smart farming networks are soil
moisture sensors that use to measure the change in soil moisture, soil temperature used to
measure the monitor the temperature in soil, air temperature, soil pH value, humidity, N, P,
K sensors, etc.showed several applications of sensors in smart agricultural management such
as; smart irrigation, leaf disease identification, improving crop yield and harvesting and also
smart animal husbandry, etc. Each application contains relevant factors effects.
Fig. 6. Automated Wireless smart Sensors (Kumar et al., 2021).

6. Application of IoT in smart farming

Smart systems are associated mainly with IoT, as it represents the backbone in all smart
applications; the most important applications of IoT smart farming are as follow:
6.1. IoT based for drones
Drones have been used commercially in agriculture since the early 1980 s in limited use, but
with the development of communication technology and the expanded use of IoT, the use of
unmanned aircraft has become very important. It can perform numerous functions that lead
to improving agricultural practices. Examples of drone operations are irrigation, monitoring
crop health, planting, crop spraying, crop inspection, and soil analysis. In addition, the drone
equipped with several sensors,3D cameras, thermal, multi-spectral, and optical imaging
cameras can be used to monitor crop conditions and diseases, plant health indicators,
vegetable density, pesticide prospecting, fertilizer, canopy cover mapping, field prediction,
plant count, plant height measurement, field water mapping, exploratory reports, nitrogen
measurement (Islam et al., 2021). Furthermore, it can monitor the state of plants based on
some vegetative indices that can be directly calculated by multi-spectral images, such as the
Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which is considered one of the most famous.
Kim et al. (2019) showed the different applications of UAVs (Harvesting, Spraying, Mapping,
Sensing UAV). Fig. 8 shows the impacts of drones on agricultural development by using real-
time data collection and processing.

7. Limitations use of drones in agriculture

Despite the many benefits of using unmanned aircraft, significant challenges are facing its
use, , especially in developing countries (Ayamga et al., 2021) as follow:

● The drone can fly for a short time, reaching an hour or less; therefore, the
flight line path must also be determined considering the overlap between the
flight lines.
● Drones cost expensive, especially those with good software, hardware tools,
devices, high-resolution cameras, and thermal cameras.
 ● Laws to operate drones: Drone needs permits for the operation; this is
difficult in many countries, as well as the height of the pilot must not exceed
400 feet.

● Climate impact: the operation of drones is affected by climatic conditions. The

wind speed and rains affect the drone performance, so the weather must be
considered before work.

7.1. IoT agricultural robot :

The agricultural robot is a robot used in many agricultural practices. IoT has contributed to
the development of robots to be achieved multiple agricultural activities, where robots can
perform many functions instead of humans. In the US and Europe and many countries in
Asia, they extended to the use of such modern technology in agriculture, where robots have
improved agriculture efficiency, as they reduced operating costs and reduced operating time
(Kootstra et al., 2021). In addition, the robots can reduce the environmental pollution of up
to 80% of farm's pesticides. Agricultural robots will be practical tools to provide
unconventional solutions for smart agriculture to face labor shortages, especially in the
spread of diseases such as the Covid 19. Several agricultural robots, such as robots for
harvesting, seedling, weed detection, irrigation, and pest infestation, livestock applications,
etc., each robot can do one or more functions, as shown in Fig. 9, Fig. 10 (Darwin et
al.,2021).

8. Conclusions:
The current work illustrated the importance of smart agriculture on improving and
increasing agricultural production in order to contribute to reducing the food demand gap.
IoT is considered the backbone of smart agricultural technology, as it connects all
components of smart systems, not only in the agricultural field but also the other
applications. Concerning the use of IoT in agriculture, it can be used in many practices such
as farm monitoring, irrigation, pest control, harvesting, etc. IoT connects several sensors
with processing units, then analyzes data, then makes appropriate decisions in real-time.
This work reviewed the application of integration IoT with UAV and Robots systems
controlled by AI techniques and the limitations of their use in developing countries. Recently,
the success of SF performance is related to the speed of data transfer. Hence, the 5G
network brought about the smart agriculture field and provided flexible and efficient
solutions, as a very high speed characterizes it compared to the fourth-generation networks.
The application of smart agricultural technology helps developing countries, such as some
Egyptian approaches that represent the beginning toward the spread of such technology and
can help develop the agriculture sector and achieve farm sustainability in those countries.
Finally, these smart technologies should be supported by governments in third world
countries at the level of small farms, as they aim to increase production and improve the
efficient use of land and water resource.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal
relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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