A Study on Modern Farming using Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Agriculture is the backbone of our country and economy, which accounts for almost 30 per cent of GDP and employs 70 per cent of the population. Though this is a rosy picture of our agriculture, how long will it meet the growing demands of the ever-increasing population? This is a difficult question to be answered, if we depend only on traditional farming. To meet the forthcoming demand and challenge we have to divert towards new technologies, for revolutionizing our agricultural productivity. In the post-green revolution period agricultural production has become stagnant, and horizontal expansion of cultivable lands became limited due to burgeoning population and industrialization. In 1952, India had 0.33 ha of available land per capita, which is reduced to 0.15 ha at present. It is essential to develop eco-friendly technologies for maintaining crop productivity. Since long, it
has been recognized that crops and soils are not uniform within a given field. Over the last decade, technical methods have been developed to utilize modern electronics to respond to field variability. Such methods are known as spatially variable crop production, geographic positioning system (GPS)-based agriculture, site-specific and precision farming (precision agriculture). The term ‘spatially variable crop production’ seems to be more accurate and descriptive than the term precision agriculture. The concept of Precision Agriculture avails the recent developments in sensors, green-house and protected agriculture structures.