An Analysis of IoT and Big Data in Sustainable Agriculture

This report delves into the transformative impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data on the agricultural sector. It begins by defining IoT and its evolution, emphasizing its role in connecting everyday objects and enabling machine-readable data. The report highlights the concept of smart agriculture, where IoT facilitates the electronic monitoring of crops, soil, and environmental conditions, enhancing decision-making through real-time data analysis. It explores the use of Big Data in agriculture, including the implementation of sensors and digital tools for collecting and analyzing farm data, such as the use of John Deere tractors and Integrated Field Systems (IFS). The report also discusses the potential of Big Data in predicting future agricultural trends and the role of wireless sensors in optimizing farming practices, such as irrigation and pesticide application. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of IoT in achieving global food security and promoting sustainable agricultural practices through crowd-sourcing platforms and centralized information repositories. Overall, the report underscores how IoT and Big Data are revolutionizing agriculture, driving efficiency, sustainability, and informed decision-making.

1. Introduction. (5 marks)- 750
Clarity of dissertation scope, aims, objectives and research question(s)
2. Literature review. (20 marks) – 3000 words
Use and critical understanding of relevant literature/theory Project Aims
The Internet of Things can be considered as a novel paradigm shift in the field of IT. The term
Internet of Things” is well-known shortly as IoT where the first word stands for “Internet” and
the second word stands for “Things”. Internet has been well-known as a global system of various
interconnected computer networks that can be used as the standard Internet protocol suite
(TCP/IP) and can easily be served as the billions of users present worldwide. Internet can be
defined as the network of networks consisting of the various public, private, academic, business
and government networks, ranging from local to global scope. This can easily be linked by a
plethora of wireless, electronic, optical networking technologies etc. The internet has been able
to link a total of 100 countries making it easier to exchange data, opinions, news etc. If the
Internet World Statistics were to be believed, as of 31st December 2011, there were over 2, 267,
233, 742 Internet users worldwide representing that around 33% of the total population of the
world is using Internet.
While discussing the “Things” in the Internet of Things, it can comprise of any person or object
which can easily be distinguished from the real world. The day to day objects will also include
the electronic devices that are encountered and used daily and other technologically advanced
products like gadgets, equipment etc. The Internet of Things has matured from its origin and it
continuing to be one of the most hyped concept in the IT world. The term Internet of Things
(IoT) has gained momentum from the last decade and has attracted the attention of the world by

projecting the vision of the global infrastructure of enabling the anytime, anyplace connectivity
for anything along with providing a networked physical objects and not only for any one.
Therefore, the Internet of Things can be considered as a global network allowing the
communication between human-to-human, things-to-things and human-to-things providing
unique identity to every object possible. The term IoT has been described as a world which can
help in connecting as well as communicating with various human, things etc. in an intelligent
fashion. The humans of our generation are concerned about being connected with one another in
terms of the electronic devices like tablets, computers, servers, smart phones, telephones etc.
This is therefore termed as the Internet of Things, actuators, sensors that are embedded in the
physical objects from the roadways to the pacemakers- these are therefore linked using the
wireless and wired networks which are often used with the same Internet IP connecting to the
Internet. All these networks will be seen to churn out huge volumes of data flowing to the
computers for the further analysis. It is seen that once the objects are able to sense the
environment and then communicate accordingly, they are seen to become a tool for
understanding the complexity of the program and therefore will respond to it in a very swift
manner. It can be seen that the whole function is highly revolutionary and these physical
information systems on being deployed are able to work largely without the intervention of the
humans. The Internet of Things can refer to as the coding and networking of everyday objects
and things for rendering them to machine-readable and traceable individually on the Internet.
The applications of the Internet of Things is seen to encompass the diverse sections like
healthcare, agriculture, retail, environment, infrastructure monitoring, supply chain management.
The application of IoT in agriculture is seen to include the soil and plant monitoring, control
system monitoring of food chain supply. However, the networking of things is seen to cost-

effective and highly useful towards the end users who are willing to accept and wide scale
adoption of IOT. The IOT and its worldwide network of intercommunicating the devices will
helping integrating the pervasive computing along with the ambient intelligence. The ultimate
purpose of vision is to provide the basic facilities for new applications like transport safety
systems, energy monitoring etc. and helps in connecting to the objects of the world in both the
sensory as well as the intelligent manner by combining the technological developments like
wireless sensor networks and embedded systems. Various technologies like Machine to machine
interface, Energy harvesting technologies, Protocols of electronic communication, actuators,
GPS, sensors, software etc. are seen to contribute to the IOT development.
Smart Agriculture
The world of agriculture is undergoing intense industrialization and therefore it is highly
important to develop the agricultural informationizaton in a simultaneous manner. The world
agriculture has also been looking forwards to the Agricultural informationization which can be
considered as a major force which will promote the agricultural development and the whole
transformation. Furthermore, it comes across as a corner stone for sustaining as well as
maintaining sound economic development. The past few decades have focused on the
agricultural information service and infrastructure development.
In order to improve the farm productivity in agriculture, there is a need to understand and
forecast the crop performance under a variety of environmental soil, irrigation, fertilisation
conditions. The same data-driven approach for the selection of crop can help in addressing the
issues like climate change, societal concerns revolving around issues like fertilizers, animal
welfare, resource constraints (water, labour, and energy shortages), and environment impacting
the agricultural production.

According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the food production is
seen to be increased by 60 percent by 2050 in order to fulfil the feeding needs of the growing
population which is exceeding to reach over 9 billion. There is a urgent need of increased crop
productivity and can be considered as the cornerstone of any solution in order to meet the issues
related to meeting the food storage and other farm profitability issues. The art of smart farming
and smart agriculture is solely dependent on the Internet of Things (IoT) and other related big
data analytics in order to address the challenges using the electronic monitoring of crops, soil,
environment, irrigation conditions. This type of monitoring data will further help in analysing
the identification of specific crops or crop varieties in order to meet the productivity targets of
any special or particular form in the world.
The Smart Agriculture is seen to have combined the capabilities and even analysed the data
streams which will in turn help the farmers in making highly informed decision-making in
their real-time as well as fast reaction towards the changes and various other unpredictable
events. For example, a study has combined the sensory data related to the soil fertility along
with the various web services related to the weather forecasting. This way better decisions can
be made regarding the fertilization and irrigation of the crops.
BIG DATA AND AGRICULTURE
Now-a-days the farming has become digitalized. Even the small scale farmers uses the
information gathered from the precision agricultural equipment and from large datasets and
precision analytics. John Deere fits all of its tractors with sensors that is helpful in collecting
information about the soil and crop conditions. This information helps the farmers to decide
where to plant crops. The information collected from the John Deere tractors are not openly
accessible by farmers. The use of large information sets and the digital tools for collecting,

separating and analyzing them-together referred to as Big-data. In olden days farming was
empirical but the information collected are not digital. But now-a-days logging data using the
application can be done more efficiently and farmer can access the information is profound.
Integrated Field Systems (IFS), is a platform under which Monsanto corporation has a suite of
digital tools for collecting and analyzing farm data. It helps to collect data on soil conditions,
weeds and weather. In the case of weed I.D., which helps the farmers to identify the weeds and
measure the weed pressure using digital mapping tools. These shows that there are corporate
benefits attached to this. In 2013, Monsanto has bought the digital tool developer climate
corporation which focuses on tools for collecting farm-level data. Canada's National Agricultural
Information Services (NAIS) on Agriculture and Agrifood has built an application called
Agroclimate Impact Reporter/AIR). Climate data from all farmers and volunteers is gathered and
supplied to the farmers using this tool Authors predict the particular agricultural systems may be
used not only in design of Big data but also in the marketing of Big data technologies. innovation
of hybrid seeds ,agronomy, data analysis, precision agriculture will provide the farmers with the
hybrid matches and increase the production of yield opportunities. bigdata tools are said to be
'revolutionizing' the farmers livelihood. It is the technology's connection with the social ecology
and human conflicts.
As per the study by Isabella M. Carbonell the prediction of the future of agriculture can be
performed using various agribusinesses like John Deere or Monsanto who have high
investment in the Bigdata. The Bigdata is seen to produce a great predictive model for
business in the various farming and agricultural business. Various sources were accumulated
by Bigdata which has primarily been commercialized owing to the large part of data resources

being coming under the industrial agricultural termed as smart farming or data-driven
agriculture.
Nowadays, the farmers are able to take help from the wireless sensors that have been placed
on the modern tractors. This will be beneficial for the farmers in every verdict of theirs. This
tractors working on the wireless sensors is able to plant crops and is also helpful in irrigating
them along with keeping a check on the quantity and timing of the spraying insecticide and
pesticides. This will also predict the day of harvesting and will also be able describe the
climatic changes. From the study conducted by Monasanto, the farmers were able to get a
significant amount of data using their WiFi data connection, sensors and the data analytics
app known as the “Climate field view pro”.
IoT is therefore considered as a revolutionary technology representing the future of
communication and computing. It also can be referred to as a network of self-configuring and
object wireless network. With the global recession taking place, a lot of ripples have been
caused across the developing and developed economies. In order to ensure the global food
security, the agriculture sector has to be highly efficient in nature. The mobile internet and
World Wide Web (WWW) have been able to implement a potential disruptive phase of the
Internet revolution. Therefore, the whole process of IOT or the internet of things can be
termed as ubiquitous computing.
The affordable, accessible and interactive crowd sourcing platform for the provision of
sustainable agriculture can be provided as a means of sharing information like sustainable
agriculture methods, tools, techniques etc. It will help in addressing the various factors related to
water security, food security and the solution will be helpful in providing the issues and micro-
finance services for the farmers. This will also help in providing a centralized repository for a

variety of information like crop disease, sustainable farming techniques etc. The primary feature
of agriculture sector like the complexity spatio temporal variability, diversity in the development
of the right kinds of devices and products. Further, the size of the farms is seen to vary from
small to large and therefore the solutions are seen to be highly scalable. As well-known from the
previous section of the literature review, the IOT can be considered as a technological revolution
representing the communication and computing and the whole development process is highly
dependent on the innovation from the wireless sensors to the nanotechnology. Therefore, in order
to connect to every single detail of the agriculture devices and objects to the large database and
network, the data has to be collected and processed. All the further developments were able to
create an IOT connecting to the world objects in a very intelligent manner. IOT will help the
real-world agricultural products present in the digital information or data in order to process it in
the virtual manner. Therefore, the temperature, pressure, humidity, gas, vital signs and
concentration etc. can be calculated. Therefore, the primary task of the IOT will be to collect the
information by using the various sensing techniques and will transform it to digital information.
The main aim of the IOT will be to analyse and process the collected information and cultivate it
to create awareness in the agricultural domain. Therefore, the combination of IOT and
agriculture will help in marking intelligence.
The Agricultural IOT will completely subvert the traditional assertions that physical world are
separated. In agricultural IOT, farmland, agricultural machines and fresh agricultural products
are integrated with chips and broadband network. Benefits of applying IoT in Agriculture include
 Improvement in use efficiency of inputs (soil, water, fertilizers, pesticides, etc,)  Reduced cost
of production.  Increased profits.  Sustainability.  Food safety.  Protection of the

environment.  with the IOT, single farmers may be able to deliver the crops directly to the
consumers not only in small region like in direct marketing or shops but in a wider area.
Now a days agriculture has become industrialized .so it is to be developed. The agricultural
development is promoted only by the idea of agricultural informationization and it is a corner
stone for transforming and maintaining sound and sustaining economic development .In the past
five years agricultural infrastructure has given the remarkable result in the field of agriculture. It
provides the basement for the agricultural information service. In terms of modern forms IoT
produce the many technologies like soilless culture, culture solution control technology ,the
artificial photosynthesis technology, growing environment control technology, intelligent
irrigation technology ,etc,. IoT technology is used in the farms for the production of plant factory
technology. This is highly efficient in agricultural system for continuous production of crops
around the year through highly accurate to control environment. It is controlled by the computer
to automatic control the temperature, humidity, co2 concentration and culture solution of crops
in farms. The smart agriculture control platform and database. The platform further consist of
subsystem as agro ecological environment control ,agricultural resource control, production
process control ,farm products ,food safety, agricultural equipments and facility. Data centre is
set of complex facilities. It includes not only a computer system but also other facilities go with
it and redundant data communication links ,environment control facility, monitor facility and
various kind of security devices. Large amount of data obtained by using radio frequency
identification, wireless communication, automatic control, information sensing techniques of
IOT, truly realizing smart agriculture.
ROLE OF SENSORS IN THE PRECISION AGRICULTURE

Precision agriculture (PA) is a farming management concept based on observing, measuring and
responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops. Crop variability involves both spatial and
temporal component . Some agriculture experts have noticed the demand for sensor data
incorporation in agricultural system and analysed how to overcome the realistic propositions
involving the government and its policies. Using this techniques the data analysts, agricultural
professionals and others give forward how to bring about better process at lower costs. The
evolution of data over the past decade has started a unique thought in the domain of information
technology and data science called Big Data. This technology is acquiring deep consideration as
an idea to develop the performance of agricultural systems by combining different systems data
and communications platform to reduce redundant crop failures, enhance agricultural governing
and agricultural services. It gathers all crop information generated through electronic smart
devices (like moisture sensors, electromagnetic sensors, and optical sensors) for a detailed area.
These smart devices will generate impressive amounts of data, impelled by record keeping,
agreement and regulatory requirements, which are considered as big data. The e-Agriculture
service data can be considered as a Big Data because of its variety of data with huge volumes
flowing with high velocity. Some of the solutions to the eAgriculture service big data include the
predominant current technologies like HDFS, Map Reduce, Hadoop, STORM etc. The following
are the points that make the performance of agricultural systems better and increase productivity:
1. Measure, store and analyze the data to improve yield quality. 2. Manage revenue costs by
reducing crop failure’s probability. 3. Improve preventive care and increase producerconsumer
satisfaction. Big data describes about the structured, semi-structured and unstructured data that
has the potential to be mined for information. Big data is a set of techniques and technologies
that require new forms of integration to uncover large hidden values from large datasets that are

diverse, complex, and a large scale. The processing of such data using common database
management tools is a very serious task. Everything around us is contributing to the generation
of Big data at every time instance. The vast Indian agricultural system is ought to harness
agriculture’s “big data” by interpreting a complex set of data, including electronic farm records
and sensor data.

Research methodology. (20 marks)- 3000 words
Relevance and justification of research methodology used.
Data Analysis and results. (35 marks)- 5250
Presentation of research findings and associated discussion and analysis.
Conclusions (10 marks)-1500
Stating in detail the conclusion(s) reached from the execution of the project
Recommendations (5 marks)- 750
Making recommendations for further work or how a proposed solution may be implemented