Integrating Technology Into Farming: A Path Towards Sustainable and Precision Agriculture

Integrating Technology Into Farming: A Path Towards Sustainable and Precision Agriculture

Hrishikesh Kokate, Dhanashri Sanadkumar Havale, Pravin Chavan
Copyright: © 2024 |Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/979-8-3693-6016-3.ch017
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Abstract

Precision farming, often known as digital agriculture, minimizes production costs by identifying both temporal and geographical changes within fields to achieve the highest levels of productivity and profitability, sustainability, and land resource conservation. The need to alter agricultural management techniques to sustainably safeguard natural resources including water, air, and soil quality while retaining economic advantages is being driven by the general public's growing environmental consciousness. It involves applying inputs (such insecticides and fertilizers) in the proper amounts, at the appropriate times, and locations. “Site-specific administration” is the term used to describe this kind of management. With almost a third of the world's food requiring irrigation for production, the productivity of the global food supply has increased in recent decades, mostly due to the expansion of irrigation systems. Global market rivalry for agricultural commodities, in general, puts traditional agricultural systems' economic sustainability in jeopardy and necessitates the creation of innovative, flexible production systems. With a focus on the methodical operationalization process, the goal of this chapter is to suggest a technology driven farming. The chapter intends to highlight how precision agriculture (PA) can facilitate farmers to use new technologies to make their farms more productive without hurting the quality of their crops or land. The chapter discusses the current status and opportunities for digitalizing agriculture sector.
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2. Digital Agriculture

Digital Agriculture, a rapidly evolving domain, encompasses various aspects and applications. At its core, Digital Agriculture refers to the integration of digital technologies into agricultural practices to enhance productivity and efficiency. It utilizes tools and management practices that leverage digital technology to address climate change, improve productivity, and ensure food security (Balasundram et al.). The agritech industry is, predictably, transforming like any other industry and becoming a knowledge-intensive business. Traditional industrial methods have been replaced by more inventive, productive, and contemporary ones as a result of this shift (Rouf et al., 2022).

Farmers have recently seen that non-production management practices also give rise to new paradigms that call for increased connection with the environment. The agricultural concepts of the near future and the present include: green agriculture, high quality, high efficiency, water-saving agriculture, and intelligent agriculture (Gebresenbet et al., 2023). Digital farming is the most effective and required strategy to accomplish all these improvements. They characterize “precision agriculture” as emphasizing agricultural production processes, whereas “digital agriculture” is an application of the “digital world” idea he put forward in the 1990s (Engås et al., 2023).

Utilizing computer and communication technologies to increase farming's profitability and sustainability is known as “digital farming.” The application of relevant and sophisticated data-intensive computer technologies, commonly referred to as the “industry 4.0 revolution,” in conjunction with digital agriculture is opening up new prospects for the agricultural sector. All farming and livestock systems may benefit from the optimal, accurate, fast, and customer-specific use of information in resource management made possible by digital farming technologies, which have a compounding impact on agricultural implementations (Morchid et al., 2024). Less than 20% of the world's agricultural regions use digital farming technologies, according to a 2015 GIFS assessment.

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