Chapter 15 - Farm automation

Abstract

As population growth increases, food production needs to increase. A population estimation says that by 2021 the world population will be around 9.1 billion. So, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has declared that food production will require increases by approximately 70% to feed these people. Much advanced technology has been developed and farmers have been using it over the last decades to increase food production. Still, advanced farming methods are required to produce a sufficient amount of food and reduce production cost. Today’s Internet of Things (IoT) has become the buzzword in technology, and IoT application in farm automation systems has been very popular for the last few years. But there is a limitation because of high network bandwidth requirements and more response time while processing. The IoT devices collect data from the field and upload that to a centralized data center (cloud server). It needs to transfer a huge amount of data continuously, but the distance between the local devices and the cloud server is too much. This delays the response and leads to failure in real-time processing. In this paper, the applications of edge computing and IoT devices in farm automation are explored. Edge computing helps to use distributed data processing instead of directly uploading to the cloud server for central data processing. It ensures performing data processing very near the IoT devices, reducing the network bandwidth requirement and improving the response time. Using edge computing and IoT (E-IoT) devices in farm automation, real-time operation can be done without failure while saving network bandwidth. Many E-IoT applications are discussed in this paper.