Digital Agriculture & Smart Farming

According to the latest news from The New Fork, the smart farming market is going to grow at an overwhelming CAGR exceeding 10% and will surpass 15 mln USD by 2024. In 2019 the startups in the sphere of agriculture have attracted 43% more in investment capital than the year before and this year the figures are still growing. Technological innovations are quickly hanging the productivity in the agricultural sector, and digital agriculture novelties are in heavy demand. No surprise Stfalcon cannot remain uninvolved, especially taking into consideration the fact that we have already been involved in Agtech projects.

We are sure that working together to implement new technologies we can make them available to those who need them the most! From the technological point of view, agriculture is ready for intense digitization though certain aspects of the digital age have reached it long ago. The adoption of the new technical solutions must help not only to increase efficiency but solve social and environmental problems as well.

Digital agricultural revolution

The experts already speak about agricultural digitization as about the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, or a “Digital Agricultural Revolution” which is going to be the newest shift helping to ensure that agriculture meets the needs of the global population. So let’s find out how digitization may influence the agricultural processes and what benefits it has.

The usage of technology in the past decade allowed the agrarians to considerably maximize harvests already, but the vital processes in farming still need optimization through automation and digitization.

Digitalization will change every segment of the agrifood chain. It’s essential to make the resource management throughout the system highly optimized, individualized, intelligent and predictive. Data-driven it should function in real-time in a hyper-connected way.

Not only supply chains should become traceable and coordinated at the most detailed level but also fields, crops and animals should be accurately managed. The ecosystems which will appear as a result will be highly productive and flexible, with greater food security, profitability, and sustainability. There exist plenty of solutions that facilitate sustainability maximization; one of them is precision agriculture. However, it requires going aside from the old manual approach.

At present, farmers can avoid plowing, fertilizing and sowing physically, they can automatically estimate the amount of the resources needed for every yield and not overspend the raw materials. It results in increased crops and improved sustainability, in the end, proving the significance of the digitization and its implementation, however, preparatory stages should be overcome first.

They are the following:

• Automation conceptualization -re-engineering of the labor-intensive processes.
• Capabilities utilizing in terms of harvest monitoring.
• Sensors installation — a fundamental aspect of maintenance equipment.

Though it’s a challenge requiring a systematic and holistic approach it will, in the end, result in sensitive benefits.

Conditions for a digital transformation

Speaking about the digital transformation of the agricultural sphere we can’t but mention the conditions that should shape it in different contexts:

• Basic conditions are the minimum ones, which should be observed to use technology. They are affordability, availability, connectivity, ICT in education and supportive policies programs and measures for digital strategies;
• ‘Enablers’) are -the factors facilitating technologies’ adoption further: internet usage, tech skills as well as agripreneurial and innovation culture support — hackathons, incubators, and accelerator programs.

More about some examples of digitization in farming you can read at full our article there https://stfalcon.com/en/blog/post/agriculture-digitization