Smart agriculture: how IoT can help feed 9.1 billion people

A rapidly increasing global population, combined with a move from plant- to meat-rich diets, has created a sense of urgency around the opportunity to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to perform high-resolution monitoring of all aspects of agricultural production with a view toward optimizing calorie yield per hectare – at the lowest possible cost. 

First some quick stats and perspective: A combination of declining mortality rates, prolonged life expectancy and younger populations in regions with high fertility has contributed to a global population growth past the 7 billion point. It’s now double that of the 1960s and is expected to hit 9.1 billion by 2050.[1] In addition, the population is growing rapidly in urban regions, and declining in rural regions, translating to fewer agricultural producers. And finally, as incomes increase, diets tend to shift more toward meat, eggs and dairy. 

This increasing population level is putting enormous strain on food sources and creating stress around the topic of “food security”. At the same time, demand for meat has driven livestock production systems toward methods that use land to produce higher-value feed crops to feed animals. Those higher-value crops would otherwise have been used to feed humans, and so this “livestock revolution”[2] is perpetuating a vicious cycle of more land going to animal feed crops, with fewer calories for humans being output per hectare overall, creating more demand for cropland which will continue to be used sub optimally.

To put it more in electronic terms, crop-to-mouth is much more efficient means of supporting and sustaining a growing population, versus crop-to-animal-to-mouth, where much of the energy is “burned up,” literally, to keep the animal alive. 

Still, people want their meat and crops and eat them too, so it’s up to IoT-based monitoring and cloud processing on both a macro (global climate, food production and population demand) and micro (caloric yield per acre from crops and livestock) to meet the challenges of global food security. 

We could have shown a diagram of the ThingWorx IoT Platform, but instead, we took the rare opportunity to feature a cow. An udderly happy, healthy cow at that, thanks to Vital Herd’s use of the ThingWorx IoT Platform to monitor dairy-cow vital signs using an ingestible pill.

With IoT, producers can increase quality, quantity, efficiency and sustainability of production by monitoring soil moisture and composition (nitrates, phosphates, pH levels), crop status and livestock feed cycles and levels. Field equipment, from harvesters to irrigation systems, can be monitored and controlled remotely, with even drones getting drafted to provide both wide-area visual updates and close-in examinations. All this data, including weather and crop demand, can be fed back for analysis using the latest learning algorithms to increase productivity in proportion to the amount of data per yearly cycle. Over time, the process gets smarter and smarter. 

Despite the stereotypical image of farmers being behind the times, many are well ahead of the game when it comes to applying technology and IoT to increase production and efficiency. Just ask ThingWorx, which has already provided its IoT Platform to the likes of OnFarm to correlate data from incompatible sensors that were already deployed. In turn, that disparate, sporadic data is up-converted into actionable intelligence optimized for production yield, cost and risk avoidance. 

Vital Herd, Inc. also uses the ThingWorx IoT Platform, in this case to monitor dairy-cattle health. Its first product is a sensor-laden pill that is ingested by the cow and used to track vital signs continuously for everything from pH levels in the stomach and heart rate, to stress, and act accordingly. Healthy cows equal healthy profits – and more optimum use of land. 

At the sensor and product level, Freewave Technologies provides the wirelessly enabled sensors to communicate from an irrigation pivot, for example, to check moisture and temperature, soil composition, wind speed, pivot location and pump power usage. 

The platforms and sensors are many and varied, but all apply real-time data to increase production at lower cost. As IoT permeates the industry and artificial intelligence algorithms improve, food production has a better chance of keeping up with demand.