Smart Agriculture Using a Soil Monitoring System

Introduction

The world's population is projected to increase dramatically by 2050, reaching 8.7 billion people, up from 6.9 billion in 2016. People are adding more protein to their diets as a result of an increase in wealth. According to a study from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), agriculturists should boost their output by 65% above present levels. To feed the expanding global population, food producers must increase their output. The demand for food will rise by about 50% as compared to 2013 with the population increase. Urbanization (Mall, P. K. et al., 2023) growth is predicted to increase another 2.4 billion people live in urban areas. Even if there is a growing need for food, growing urbanization reduces the number of people residing in village regions, which results in a shrinking agricultural workforce. In addition, rural residents are quickly ageing, which will result in a severe manpower shortage in the future. The world's agriculture is becoming unsustainable as a result of population development and urbanization, and 25% of the world's arable land is already damaged. Nearly 40% of the world's rural population experiences water shortages, indicating that water resources are already at an extreme level of use. To increase production, unbalanced fertilizers are utilized, which affects the amount of soil nutrients. The major soil nutrients are nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K), whereas iron, manganese, zinc, boron, and chlorine are the insignificant ones. The development of the plant and excellent yields depend on the proper balance of these nutrients. Amino acids are produced by macronutrients like nitrogen, whereas phosphorus and potassium aid in the development of plant growths, photosynthesis, and disease resistance. Due to improper irrigation timing and unbalanced fertilizer application without knowledge of a certain crop's real nutritional needs, soil fertility is reduced. With advancements in science and technology, agriculture's traditional methods are changing. Technology in agriculture advances, responds to customers' genuine needs, and maintains the balance between supply and demand for food. Because of the advancements in automation like sensors, gadgets, equipment, information technologies, and quick transmission networks, modern farms and agricultural operations operate differently. Robots (Alam, A., 2022), sensors, aerial photographs, and GPS (Samanta, D. et al., 2021) technology are all used. Modern technology helps farmers to utilize water, fertilizers, and other resources efficiently. The efficiency and production of agriculture are predicted to rise with technological advancements as larger and miniature farmlands are closing and becoming more integrated in comparison with earlier years. Data collection is crucial for identifying trends, and it is anticipated that there would be 4 million more data points than on a typical farm. The IoT (Reepu, S. Kumar, et. al., 2023) enables the analysis of both structured and unstructured data to provide additional information about food production (Kumari, M., et al., 2022). IoT platforms are converting agricultural frameworks into true AI frameworks by using machine learning, AI, etc. to data from field sensors (Ghosh, R. et al., 2020). Farmers may make better judgments by studying and connecting data on the weather, seeds, soil, disease likelihood, and insect assaults.