AgroBahrain: A Conceptual Framework for Agriculture Big Data for Bahrain

Abstract

Agriculture is facing and causing many challenges such as increased GHG emissions, food security issues, water scarcity. In addition, the growing world population creates an increasing demand for food production, which requires all countries of the world to join hands and cooperate to achieve food security. Agriculture data collection and analysis using emergent technologies such as IoT devices, cloud services, and big data is in the early development stages; however, it has been adopted and experimented with in many regions worldwide. These technologies demonstrated the ability to improve crop productivity and quality, minimize resource consumption, and reduce the impact on the environment. This study aims to establish the first phase in ongoing research on “AGRO Big Data: Toward Smart farming in the Kingdom of Bahrain” by designing a conceptual IoT-based framework that employs cloud services and big data tools. The kingdom of Bahrain is a small island that suffers from water scarcity and harsh soil conditions. It is considered a non-agriculture country and highly dependent on imported crops. The proposed framework will identify different agriculture stakeholders (users) in Bahrain and data domains such as soil sensors and weather stations. It will suggest using a mobile application (AgroBahrain) to collect and disseminate farm-related data along with the adoption of Google cloud services for the storage and transformation of agriculture big data. The framework is divided into two modules: 1- data collection and storage module, 2- data diffusion module. It concentrates on plants and crops data, excluding cattle and livestock. The framework is the first to build a conceptual process of collection, storage, and transformation of agriculture data in Bahrain. It is aligned with the kingdom's agriculture strategy developed early 2010. Moreover, the framework paves the road towards advancing the research in different agriculture-related fields, such as soil and crop quality.