06/11/2021 | News release | Distributed by Public on 06/11/2021 04:36
Worldwide crop yields have increased by an extraordinary amount over the past century or so. In the UK alone, annual yields of wheat, barley and oats are perhaps 400% what they were in the early 20th century.
Multiple different factors are at play in this vastly increased efficiency, from increasingly high-tech farming equipment, to carefully selected and refined crop varieties, to smarter pest control and fertilisers. Even better weather forecasting has played its part. But what all those factors ultimately come down to is a better understanding of the qualities which improve crop yields - and the ability to transform that understanding into tangible agricultural practices. In other words, data-driven decision-making.
And now, the advent of the IoT is ushering in a whole new era of said decision-making in the agricultural sector. Agricultural applications of the IoT include systems to monitor the health of crops as they grow (and the concurrent growth of any weeds), water management solutions, particularly as climate change alters global weather patterns, and even location tracking for livestock.
Smart soil condition monitoring is one such application - and a multipurpose application at that. By deploying a network of soil sensors throughout an agricultural environment, farmers can measure a host of different factors which can in turn help them cultivate crops more efficiently. These factors include:
Collectively, all this data helps farmers and agricultural businesses to take a far more proactive and informed approach to managing their crops, not just day by day, but season by season and year by year. And this intelligence does not merely help to maximise crop yields. It can also help to optimise the agricultural environment for wildlife, preserve soil quality over time and prevent erosion. Indeed, this most high-tech of solutions can actually help human agriculture work more in harmony with the natural world.