Smart Agriculture: Current State, Opportunities, and Challenges
Bilal Ahmed, Hasnat Shabbir, Syed Rameez Naqvi, Lu Peng
Abstract
Smart agriculture or precision farming is a rapidly evolving multidisciplinary field encompassing knowledge from agriculture, technology, data science, and environmental science to name a few. Amidst the large number of recent research publications related to smart agriculture and intelligent farming practices, a need arises to summarize their findings in a single consolidated review article. This work endeavors to summarize recent key technologies and applications of smart agriculture, delineate the prevalent challenges it faces, highlight its publicly available datasets for adoption, and offer some policy guidelines for stakeholders, assisting them in making informed decisions regarding technology adoption and investment. We conclude that smart agriculture can potentially revolutionize the agricultural sector, provided we overcome the challenges by ensuring effective collaboration among stakeholders, a strong infrastructure, digital literacy, adoption incentives, data privacy, interoperability, favorable policy frameworks, and continuous research and development.