Usage of Smart Farming for Addressing Agricultural Problems: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Glut and less arrivals of the agricultural produce (supply-demand mismatch) is directly leading to agricultural price fluctuations. Prices of most of the daily consumed perishable commodities go very high in some season and dips very low in other season, directly impacting farmers and consumers in either situation. Due to the observed effect of price fluctuations and agricultural market instability along with its impact on small and medium scale farmer’s development in India, this paper attempts to suggest ways of how farmers can improve their agricultural yield in order to sustain their income and also get a better lifestyle by use of appropriate technological innovation in agriculture like farm sensors, artificial intelligence, and drones. This also supports government in all the decision making process. Development of farm-specific, data-driven diagnostics to determine crop yield and crop health has come up as a big opportunity area. Start-ups are leveraging drone and tractor-based IOT (Internet of Things) applications to get data (both on weather and agricultural parameters) on field to determine risks. Increasing smart phone penetration will enable precise decision making in farming activities, helping farmers to derive increased productivity and revenue while reducing unit costs. This includes improvements to help farmers in timely and accurate estimation of sowing and harvesting in sync with consumer demand patterns. Such linkages operate at the critical points of supply chain: Input, Process and Output areas. These models aim to link producers to remunerative sourcing agencies for procurement and to profitable buyers for output sale and government can take better decision to provide right kind of schemes and compensations to the farmers. This concept paper proposes software controlled integrated agricultural produce management.