Rapid growth in society, weather change, decreased rainfall, and demand for excess food to sustain billions of people globally are placing a lot of influence on farming. That provides negative impacts on traditional farming practices. We are hear come with smart sensors in agriculture.
The current situation wants farming to become more “smart” by using modern and intelligent technologies. To find the solutions for the best utilization of resources, meeting the global population’s ever-increasing consumption needs.
Smart sensors in agriculture provide data that helps farmers monitor and optimize their crops and keep updated with changing environmental and ecosystem factors.
A smart agriculture sensors helps the animal Identification, heat detection, and health monitoring, And helps to separate and treat sick cows while locating and tracking their herd. Smart sensors in agriculture, farmers can understand their crops and their productivity, sustain resources, and can prevent or control the crops from environmental impact or disater.
What is the Role of Sensors in Agriculture?
Sensors used in agriculture for smart farming are known agriculture sensors.
They provide data that helps farmers to monitor and optimize crops with environmental conditions and challenges.
These sensors in agriculture installed and fixed in weather stations, drones, and robots used in the agriculture industry.
They can be controlled by mobile apps precisely, which develops for this purpose.
Agri sensors based on wireless connectivity; they can be controlled directly using wifi or through cellular towers with the help of mobile phone applications.
Types Of The Sensors In Agriculture
A sensor is an easy and small tool that measures or detects natural world conditions such as motion, heat, or light and converts this condition into an analogue or digital representation.
There are many types of sensors used in agriculture for smart agriculture incorporates.
1. Optical Sensors In Agriculture
It employs light to measure soil properties, various frequencies of light. These sensors placed on vehicles or drones, allowing soil reflectance and plant colour data to be gathered and processed. Optical sensors can determine clay, organic matter, and soil moisture content.
2. Electrochemical Sensors For Soil Nutrient Detection
It helps to collect soil chemical data. Electrochemical sensors provide information sensors for soil nutrient detection. Soil samples are sent to a soil-testing lab. Specific measurements, especially the determination of pH, are performed utilizing an ion-selective electrode. These electrodes sense the activity of particular ions, such nitrate, potassium, or hydrogen.
3. Mechanical Soil Sensors For Agriculture
These sensors use a mechanism that cuts through the soil and documents the force measured by pressure scales or load cells.
When a sensor cuts through the soil, it records the holding forces resulting from the cutting, breaking, and displacing of soil. Soil mechanical resistance measured in a unit of pressure and represents the ratio of the force required to enter the soil medium to the frontal area of the tool engaged with the soil.
4. Dielectric Soil Moisture Sensors
It measures moisture levels in the soil. The moisture sensors use in connection with rain check locations throughout the farm. This allows for the observation of soil moisture conditions when vegetation level is low.
5. Location Sensors In Agriculture
These sensors determine the range, distance and height of any position within the required area. They take the help of GPS satellites for this purpose.
6. Electronic Sensors
It installed on tractors and other field equipment to check equipment operations. Then, cellular and satellite communication systems used to convey the data immediately to computers or e-mail it to people. The field executive can then recover the information on their office computer or cell phone.
7. Airflow Sensors
Its measurements can made at particular locations while on the go. The desired output is the pressure needed to push a decided amount of air into the ground at a prescribed depth. Various soil properties, including compaction, structure, soil type, and moisture level, produce a different identifying signature.
8. Agriculture Sensors IOT
This sensor provides information such as air temperature, soil temperature at various depths, rainfall, leaf wetness, chlorophyll, wind speed, dew point temperature, wind direction, relative humidity, solar radiation, and atmospheric pressure is measured and recorded at scheduled intervals.
There is a big list of sensors used in agriculture IOT sensors which means (Solutions for Smart Farming).
(a) Monitor Climate Conditions
(b) Greenhouse Automation
(c) Crop Management
(d) Cattle Management And Monitoring
(e) Smart Precision Based Agriculture Using Sensors
(f) Agricultural Drones
How do Agriculture Sensors Help Small Scale Farmers?
Agricultural sensors help small scale farmers by many tools or handy devices.
There are some farmers who are not able to buy all these sensors used in agriculture. There is only a small cost for the farmers that they have to bear, and that is to buy a smartphone. A smartphone can save them from the expenses of all those sensors, a phone has a lot of applications that work exactly sensors for your fields.
So let’s know about all those phone applications and their tools also.
| Smartphone Tools | Smartphone Applications |
| GPS | Provides location for mapping crops, location alerts for disease/pest, solar radiation predictions, and fertilizing. |
| Camera | Provides pictures of leaf health, lighting, brightness, and ripeness level. Also used for measuring Leaf Area Index (LAI) and measuring soil organic. |
| Microphone | It helps to predict maintenance of machinery. |
| Accelerometer | It helps to determine Leaf Angle Index. |
Uses Of The Sensors In Agriculture
There many sensors used in smart farming:
They used in Agriculture sensors, IoT or agricultural weather stations. These equipment equipped with sensors that provide information about soil temperature, air temperature, rainfall, leaf wetness, chlorophyll, wind direction, solar radiation, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure etc.
- They used in many equipment or devices which are developed by agro-based industries for farming applications such as measuring trunk diameter, leaf wetness and many more.
- Sensors used in smart agriculture drones to spray insecticides and pesticides on the crops.
- Solar based pumps are very popular amongst the farmers of their easy mobile operations to reducing electricity costs.
- E-fences, which become very popular in rural India to save crops from animals.
Advantages Of Sensors In Agriculture
There are many advantages of Agriculture Sensors, from which you can take many privileges.
Sensors in Agriculture invented to meet the increasing demand for food with minimum resources such water, fertilizers and seeds.
- They are easy to operate and use and easy to maintain.
- Sensors are cheaper in price and best in quality.
- They can used for measuring pollution and global warming for their fields and crops.
- These sensors equipped with wireless chips so that they can be controlled remotely.
How does the use of Sensors in Agriculture can help the farmers in a futuristic way?
Labour shortages and the need for food to feed an increasing global population, agricultural robots and technologies now commonly used by farmers.
The vision and mission of machine education now allow robots and sensors to see and train surroundings, and of the cheaper costs of smart sensors, they used for more than a year.
New innovative sensing technology allows farmers to monitor their fields’ pest groups remotely and take immediate action to protect their crops, using online cloud services and a dashboard.
Things To Consider Before Starting Smart Sensors In Agriculture System
As we can see, the uses of sensors in agriculture are endless. There are many ways smart devices can help you increase your farm’s performance, productivity and revenue. However, operating and uses of Agriculture Sensors is not a cup of tea for everyone.
There are specific challenges with sensors in agriculture, which you need to be aware of before investing in sensors in agriculture and smart farming.
Choose Sensor For Your Device
To create a clarification for agriculture, you need to choose the sensors for your device. Your choice will depend on the types of information you want to gather and the purpose of your solution in general. The quality of your sensors is important to the success of your product, and it will depend on the correctness of the gathered data and its authenticity.
Brain Of Your Device
Data analytics should be the focus of every smart sensors in agriculture solution. You need to have convincing data analytics capabilities and apply algorithms and machine learning in order to obtain actionable insights based on the obtained data.
Maintenance Of Your Device
Maintenance of your device is a challenge that is of main importance for sensors in agriculture if your sensors used in the field and can easily damaged. In this case, you need to make sure your device is durable and easy to maintain. Otherwise, you will need to replace your sensors more frequently, you would like.
Mobility Of Device
Smart farming applications should used in the field. A farm owner should be able to access all information on-site or remotely via a smartphone or desktop computer.
Each connected device should be independent and have enough wireless range to communicate with the other devices and send data to the main server.
Reliable Infrastructure For Your Device
To ensure your smart farming application performs well, you need a reliable internal infrastructure.
Your internal systems have to be completely secure. Failing to properly secure your system only increases the chances of stealing your data or even taking control of your sensors which connected with your field.
Connectivity Of Your Device
The need to transfer data many agricultural devices and facilities is a big challenge for the adoption of smart farming. The connection between these facilities should be reliable enough to face bad weather conditions and to guarantee non-disruptive operations.
We hope this is adequate and reliable information about sensors in agriculture. This information will definitely help and guide you through buying a smart and reliable agriculture sensor. For more information about sensors in agriculture, smart farming and profitable agriculture, stay connected with Tractor Junction.
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