Agriculture: talk about money not of plants?

Hi readers, hope you enjoyed the first article on agriculture. Here is the second part.

Bill &Melinda Gates says,

“Investment in agriculture are the best weapons against hunger and poverty, and they have made life better for billions of people” OK

The transition of Industrial agriculture to e-agriculture and m-agriculture clearly indicated that digital technology in agriculture is fast changing the old concepts. Use of terminology/technologies comprising smart, precision, and digital agriculture/farming are the meaning of today’s agriculture which impersonate agricultural practices in more accurate, optimized, and controlled demeanors and fulfilled the age-old dream of famers of having innovative and leading-edge tools that can help them collect and analyze farming data to increase crop yields. Smart technologies provided such tools and enabled farmers to have information related with soil content, (minerals, soil organic matter, living organisms, gas, and water), moisture, nutrient trends, and even weather system’s effects on any square foot of his land.

Integrating that data, land, and crop into software used in marketing, forecasting, and production is the thus, the new “norm” of today’s agriculture

So, let’s first talk about Precision agriculture (PA) which is an agricultural/farming concept based on inter and intra-field variability in crops, its measurement and management. The goal of precision agriculture is to adopt approaches of growing crops and raising livestock more accurate, optimized, and controlled.

The term Precision agriculture was introduced in early 1990s by John Deere upon introducing GPS guidance for having automated steering for tractors, low to no error and wastage of seeds, which means less input of money and energy and more output in the form of production. Today, GPS technology, has converted precision agriculture into an industry aided by E and m-agriculture, adoption of mobile devices, access to high-speed internet, low-cost and reliable satellite communication (all being used In Pakistan), farm equipment optimized by manufacturer for PA which played vital role in characterizing the trend for precision agriculture.

Integral parts of PA comprised:

automated hard and software,

autonomous vehicles,
drones,
GPS guidance,
robotics,
sensors,
soil sampling, and
telematics.

Using these instruments, farmers can measure within-field soil variations and make input strategy accordingly which can lead to optimum use of fertilizer, reduced costs, and environmental impact.

Smart agriculture is an application of information, technologies, and data (that is mostly collected through precision agriculture for optimizing complex farming system. Its main focus is thus on access to data collection (who collect and where it goes?) and how farmers can use that data to get more food with less investment and from same land.

The technologies used in smart farming ranges from IoT and robotics to drones and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Thus, farmers can monitor field conditions without going into the field which enables them to make decisions for the whole farm, a portion, percentage, or even a single plant of that farm.

Thus, IoT is the main tool in providing this new levels of data and controls and is thus a powerful driver of transforming farming, agriculture, and food into innovative webs of connected objects.

But for this transformation to happen, farmer needs to collect, communicate, store, retrieve, and analyze data, and need up-to-date information and insights well before making decision. Obviously, every famer (big or small) cannot get such information at their own. Big AgriTech companies provides such timely information to the growers (through purchase or leveraging) when they need it in Realtime.

Smart agriculture is therefore a software managed and sensor monitored technology which reduces agricultural operational cost and is suitable for big farming corporations. Its initial massive investment is not suitable for small farms. Even the big landlords and progressive farmers prefer to leverage the smart technologies for boosting the production of their farms.

Nobody is using Smart Agriculture in Pakistan in any form by any of the farmer’s community. Only Realtime data related with reference to whether information is being provided to some farmer’s communities registered with those who has manage accesses to such technologies in Pakistan. They are collecting crops and soil related data through e- and m-agriculture but, who is using and analyzing that data in not known.

Digital agriculture (DigiAg) is all about i. using digital technology for integrating concepts of precision and smart technologies and agricultural production from compound to the consumer, and ii., creating value from data collected through precision and smart agriculture to create actionable intelligence and meaningful value for data in order to make informed decisions and improved productivity.

DigiAg as defined by DLG (German Agricultural Society) is a

“consistent application of methods of precision and smart farming, internal and external networking of farm and use of web-based data platforms together with “Big Data analyses”

How has it happened? This is the main question which can not be answered unless we focus on IoT which is a

physical object possessing sensors, processing ability, software, and other technologies that can connect and exchange data with other devices (such as those working for precision agriculture like automated hard and software, autonomous vehicles, drones, GPS guidance, robotics, sensors, soil sampling, and telematics., and other mobile devices, objects, computers, and systems connected to the internet or other communication network.

This data is pouring in round the clock as a one-way traffic because it is free, but it cannot be utilized unless one can find a pattern or some useful insight into it for which machine learning technique of AI is being used to train chatbot for collecting and using large data sets to make sense out of it.

For example, AI chatbots can be trained on data sets that contain text recordings of human conversation collected from messenger apps to learn how to understand what humans say and require, and to come up with appropriate responses.

This is just one example to explain it you dear readers how data coming out of E, M, Precision, and Smart agriculture (in which farmers talked about plants/crops, collect data, and ask questions about their problems) is being used and there are millions of such chatbots gathering huge amount of data free of cost from all over the world though various apps. But when this data is converted into actionable intelligence to provide Realtime information to the farmer enabling them to make timely and right decision, they have to purchase and/or leverage technology (made through using the data collecting through them) that can provide that information or purpose-built data model. Now you talk about Money.

The data collected through precision and smart technologies is processed through IoT connected software for making purpose-built i. environmental data models (based on data pouring in continuous through precision agriculture), ii. land and surface agronomic models (based on data that is coming in through E and m-agriculture and other IoT connected devices), iii. adaptive data processing (a system that learns from our habit of data usages practices that adapts to our organization’s environment where analytic decisions are made for the samples collected from the field in response to real-time measurement results obtained through smart agriculture, iv. state of the science which means scholarly activity indicating what other researcher have reported for these fields and v. finished products comprising purpose-built models, information and/or software making it readily available for utilization by the customers worldwide.

DigiAg therefore, is all about creating value from data collected through precision and smart agriculture via IoT to create actionable intelligence and meaningful value for that data which is continuously pouring in). and ii. integrating concepts and data collected through precision and smart farming.

Deseret Agriculture is a practice of developing agriculture in deserts which is challenging because agriculture is depending on water which is scarce in deserts. Nevertheless, desert farming is in practice since 5000 BC in Negev Desert. Modern desert agriculture is being practiced in Imperial Valley of Southern California, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine using water re-use, desalination, drip irrigation, and/or seawater greenhouse etc., all modern ways that regions and countries are using to expand their agriculture despite being in an arid climate. One example:

Just Imagine

Within Six hours, deserts receive more energy form the sun than humankind consumes within a year. Since much of the world is arid, with only water being the sea, which should be used to green coastal deserts like being practiced in Chile, California, Peru, and the Middle East.

The technology is: seawater greenhouse (SWGH). The concept provides climate protection, energy security and development by generating sustainable power from abundant renewable resource: the sea water: which is 3 times of the earth.

Like in natural water cycle, seawater is heated by the sun, evaporates, cools to form clouds, and returns to earth as rain. In SWGH, hot desert air goes into a Greenhouse, cooled, and then humidified by deep seawater: Deep ocean (below 200 meters depth) is cold, with an average temperature of only 4°C (39°F). Colder water sinks below the warm water at the surface, which contributes to the coldness of the deep ocean and nourishes crops growing inside green house and then passes through an evaporator. When it meets cold deep seawater, fresh water condenses and collected which is used to grow plant outside the greenhouse.

SWGH is functioning since 2018 near Aqaba in Jordan just a kilometer away from Israeli border,
First farm, growing vegetables has been running since 2016 in south Australian desert,
The Sahara Forest Project is growing food and bio-fuel crops since 2015,

Energy rich countries can use seawater greenhouse technology but countries like Pakistan despite having huge deserts cannot follow this because we are energy deficient country and will probably remain so.