Precision Farming Utilizing Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Automation: An Overview

The food demand is rising enormously due to the increasing population worldwide. The farmers’ conventional practices need to be revised to meet the dietary needs of the global masses. Moreover, the excess use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and water degrades the environment and increases the production cost of cultivation. To satisfy the requirements of a rapidly rising global population, farming requires modern scientific and technological implementations like the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Automation. Technology-based precision farming has started to play an essential role in soil, insect, weed and irrigation management, eventually boosting agricultural output. AI-powered automation in precision farming can save water, pesticides, and herbicides, maintain soil fertility, and boost the productivity and quality of agricultural products by drastically lowering waste. Before AI-based automation can be extensively embraced by all types of farmers worldwide, several issues need to be resolved, such as the unequal distribution of mechanization, algorithms’ capacity to reliably handle enormous volumes of data, and data security and privacy. In the study, we reviewed several scientific papers on the potential applications of IoT, AI, and some other emerging innovations for creating automated innovative farm machinery, irrigation systems and drones for the protection of plants, nutrient, pesticide and herbicide management and crop health monitoring.