Smart Agriculture-Potentials,Challenges&Solutions
The purpose of agriculture is to produce plants and animals for providing mankind food,fiber,feed and fuel(4Fs)to sustain and enhance life.To improve production,people have historically tried to create and/or improve their farming technologies and keep evolving.In terms of the key features of farming technologies being used,one method is to classify those technologies into traditional,mechanized,and precision farming.Traditional farming attempted to achieve self-sufficiency through increasing farming land and using natural methods of fertilizing and weed/pest control to increase yield.Mechanized farming,characterized by using machinery,agrochemicals,and high-yielding crop varieties,has greatly improved productivity.Precision farming,characterized by mechanized operation with precision,helped to achieve a reduction in natural resources consumption in crop production to make it more sustainable.With the continuing growth of the human population,it is expected that by 2050 people will need to double the food production coupled with diet transformation driven by a global increase in the middle class.Strategies to meet this growing demand include increasing productivity,enhancing production efficiency,and emphasizing food safety and nutrition while protecting the environment and conserving limited natural resources.In short,it put human in a situation that it have to produce more and better food with less resources.While significant advancements have been made via precision farming technologies for achieving high productivity with reduced adverse effects to the ecosystem,existing and emerging smart technologies such as sensor,data and communication,imaging and signal processing,cloud computing,machine learning and robotics offer much potential toward meeting the 2050 goals.However,the development and adoption of smart technologies and innovations for crop production would require the convergence of different knowledge domains to realize its full potential.While the innovative"Smart Agriculture"technology will bring in much to realize the potential,it may also create a big challenge to producers:do they have sufficient ability to adopt such complicated technologies in their production?Such ability limitations could be originated from technological,knowledge,economic aspects,or the combination of those factors.It is essential to find practical solutions for removing identified adoption obstacles before smart agriculture technologies could really bring promised benefits to crop producers.There could be no universal solutions because the business models are for producers of different crops,with different production scales,and in different economic development regions,but all should satisfy one common goal of making their crop production business sustainable.
Qin Zhang
Department of Biological Systems Engineering,Washington State University,USA
国内会议
北京
英文
50-53
2019-10-19（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）