مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد کاربردهای اینترنت اشیا برای کشاورزی – IEEE 2018

The history of agriculture starts at least 22,000 years ago when mankind learned to collect wild grains as food. Various crops have been cultivated as earlier as 9500 BC in Levant according to archaeological discoveries (Hillman, 1996; Walsh, 2009). Over tens of thousands of years since then, significant innovations have been made from time to time to increase the agricultural yield and reduce the heavy human labor needed. However, the demand for more foods from the increasing population will never get satisfied. It is predicted that the world’s population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050, which is about 33% more than today (un.org, 2015). Consequently, to keep pace with such population growth, the global production of food has to increase at least 70% to feed the world. Meanwhile, only a small portion of earth’s surface is available for agriculture uses, due to various limitations, including temperature, climate, topography, soil quality, and technologies. Agricultural land use is also shaped by political and economic factors, such as land tenure patterns, environmental regulations, and population density (learner.org, 2016). In fact, the total agricultural land used to produce food has been decreasing for the last few decades. In 2013, total agricultural land used to produce food was around 18.6 million square miles, which covers 37.73% of the world’s land area. In comparison, in 1991, these numbers were 19.5 million and 39.47%. So, humanity is facing a daunting challenge of how to feed more people with less land, as shown in Figures 18.1 and 18.2 (WorldBank, 2016). The answer to the critical issue lays in a new technology “precision agriculture” (PA) that will have a profound effect on the lives of billions of people. The precision agriculture techniques and technologies aim to improve the efficiency of agriculture to maximize food production, minimize environmental impact, and reduce cost. Basically, PA, or site-specific agriculture (SA), is integrated information and production-based farming system that can collect precise data on every site in the field and accordingly customize the cultivation of each site independently. In the traditional way, agricultural operations such as planting or harvesting are performed by following a predetermined schedule. However, the effectiveness of practice and schedule could be greatly improved with smarter decisions based on real-time data and predictive analytics on weather, soil quality, crop maturity, equipment, labor costs, and availability. The PA is a farming management system based on observing, measuring, and responding to agricultural variabilities in different aspects. In PA, the large fields are managed as a group of small fields and each small one will be treated precisely and independently with reduced misapplication of water, seed, and nutrients in order to increase crops and farm efficiency. As an emerging paradigm, the IoT is considered to be the next big thing that can have a significant influence on the future of the world. By applying latest IoT technologies in agriculture practice, traditional ways of farming can be fundamentally changed on every aspect, to pave the way to a new agriculture pattern of PA. Briefly, the implementation of PA relies on three stages: (i) the real-time data acquisition, (ii) data analysis and decision-making, and (iii) corresponding precise treatments. All these three stages can be greatly facilitated with the advancing of the IoT technologies in recent years. First of all, IoT provides the fundamental network infrastructure through which enormous smart objects, spanning from microsensors to heavy agricultural vehicles can easily interconnect to each other and to the Internet.