Embracing smart agriculture: Meeting global food needs and tackling today's farming challenges

Escalating population is the foremost hindering factor of development across the world. World’s populace is expected to 2.4 billion upsurges by 2050 and bulk of these will live in major cities of developing countries. To feed the estimated population, the current agricultural production must increase by 60 percent by 2050 to satisfy the expected demands for food if current trends of consumption and economic growth continues. With this mounting target to escalate agricultural production, the present-day agriculture production is in declining trend mainly due to the problems like degradation of soil properties and fertility, soil erosion, shrinking of resources, pollution of resources, supply of spurious inputs, increasing cost of labours, labour scarcity, fragmented landholdings, stagnation and declining trends in productivity and natural calamities due to changing climate. Therefore, agriculture must transform itself to feed escalating worldwide populace and deliver the basis for financial growth and poverty reduction with new technologies, which are capable to take farm productivity and profitability to the next level and to overcome all difficulties in feeding the estimated population. India has demonstrated big transformation in the agriculture sector after ‘Green Revolution’ but now we need to go for a ‘Technology Revolution’ to accelerate the progression in the farming sector. This technology revolution is nothing but smart agriculture which has got all hi-tech inputs that can steer us away from the glitches of present-day agriculture. Smart agriculture has the potential to double the food production and reducing wastages and losses by 50 percent by 2050 along with lesser impact on environment. Smart agriculture is the all-new agricultural production mode and ecosystem which is based on digital farming, smart farming, and precision agriculture through use of information and communication tools and technologies.