Smart Agricultural Mechanization in India—Status and Way Forward

Abstract

Smart farming is an emerging concept in the digital era that balances sustainable agriculture’s economic, environmental, and social dimensions. This concept makes agriculture practices smart and intelligent using digital technologies like Information Communication Technology (ICT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT), robotics, unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). These technologies are replacing the complex, laborious, unreliable and time-consuming traditional farming techniques with efficient, reliable and sustainable smart agriculture. Basically, digital farming is the amalgamation of precision agriculture (PA) and smart farming. Precision agriculture (PA) monitors and optimizes the inputs, thus saving the resources. However, smart farming senses the physical parameters of surroundings, learns from past experience, adapts the environment, infers from results and observations and anticipates future outcomes. The concept of smart farming can be deployed equally in either small or large farms. With the introduction of IoT in digital agriculture, farms can be monitored and controlled remotely using an Internet connection. In addition, sensor data will be transferred to different locations and can be analyzed and processed by various AI algorithms. The pace of innovations in the field of digital agriculture/smart farming is very fast and issues related to farm practices that seemed to be complex have now been solved easily and efficiently.