Digital agriculture is the application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and data ecosystem to assist farmers and other stakeholders in the agriculture value chain in the development and delivery of timely, targeted information and services needed for safe, nutritious and affordable food for all, at the same time making it profitable and sustainable. Digital agriculture plays an important role in knowledge exchange, targeted recommendations, market integration and access to finance for making agriculture as a beneficial enterprise and attractive for youth. Massive technological development and opportunities over the last few decades have altered people’s lives, but these opportunities have not benefited the agriculture domain in a significant way.
Smart agriculture is a farming management concept using modern advanced technology to increase the quantity and quality of agricultural products. The area of agricultural land has been decreased by 0.7% between the years 2015 and 2013. But, to feed the growing world population, estimated to reach approximately 10 billion by 2050, it is important to multiply the current food production within available agricultural land. The world needs not only sufficient quantity of food, but it also should be rich in quality and nutrients. To increase the capability of agriculture and food industry it is important to adopt smart agriculture. Farmers in the 21st century have access to technologies such as GPS, soil scanning, data management, and Internet of Things (IoT) etc.
The combination of digital agriculture and smart agriculture provides technology suitable for optimization of farming resources and the analysis and data management needed to optimize the quantity of such resources required for crops. The precise measurements of variations in the field and adaptation of suitable strategies can greatly increase the effectiveness of pesticides and fertilizers, and selective usage of them. Technologies such as the spread of mobile technologies, remote-sensing services and distributed computing in the agriculture sector is improving smallholders’ access to the information, inputs and markets, streamlining supply chains, reducing operational costs and also increasing production and productivity.
The ease of availability, portability and mobility of digital technologies used in smart agriculture are optimizing agriculture as well as food production. The integration of mobile devices gathering real-time data and information, analytics turning vast data into actionable information and knowledge, IoT collecting diverse source of information and delivering customized data and Geographic Information System (GIS) & Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) providing spatial and temporal dimension to information play major role while practicing digital agriculture. Previously proved experiments show the potential of digital agriculture in modifying the current status of the agriculture sector and reducing the burden on the agriculture and food industry to produce adequate food. Therefore, it is important to step into smart agriculture and invest in the same to achieve sustainable development goals.
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