IoT increases farms’ productivity and efficiency---ensures food supply

There are several benefits that can be derived from the use of IoT in agriculture. Some of the benefits have been mentioned in the discussion of application of IoT in Sections III and IV. However, we reiterate and summarize some of the benefits as follows.

Community Farming: The use of IoT can help promote community farming especially in the rural areas. The IoT can be leveraged to promote services that allows the community to have a common data storage, share data and information, increase interaction between the farmers and agriculture experts [101]. Also, through the use of mobile apps and IoT facilities equipment can be shared within the community via free or paid services.

Safety Control and Fraud Prevention: The challenge in the agriculture sector is not just limited to sufficient production but also the ability to ensure safe and nutritious food supply. There have been several reports in food fraud which includes adulteration, counterfeit, artificial enhancement [102]. This fraud poses health challenge and can have negative economic impact [103], [104]. Some of the components of food fraud discussed in [104] are product integrity, process integrity, people integrity, and data integrity can be addressed using IoT technology. IoT can be used to provide logistics traceability and qualitative traceability of food [105].

Competitive Advantages: The increase in demand for food and the use of innovative technology is expected to make the agriculture sector very competitive. Also, the enabling of data driven agriculture using IoT will open new direction in trading, monitoring, and marketing. The ability to lower costs, reduce wastage in application of farm inputs, such as fertilizer and pesticides increase productivity. The use of real-time data for decision making will provide the competitive advantage needed for farmers who adopt the IoT ecosystem.

Wealth Creation and Distributions: The deployment of IoT will provide new business models, where the single farmers can avoid the exploitation of “middle men” and can be in direct relationship with the consumers [10] leading to higher profit.

Cost Reduction and Wastage: One of the perceived advantages of IoT is the ability to monitor remotely devices and equipment [106]. The application of IoT in agriculture will help to save time and money in inspecting large fields compared to personnel physically inspecting the field either via use of vehicles or walking. The ability to know when and where to apply pesticides or insecticides using IoT will reduce cost and wastage.

Operational Efficiency: The operational efficiency not only relates to farmers but to decision makers related to agriculture sector, such as government and nongovernmental agencies. Data gathered from agriculture surveillance schemes via IoT can serve as a guide in agriculture interventions. Such interventions can be prevention of spread of diseases, veld fire outbreaks, compensation schemes and resource allocations. In addition, farmers can take advantage of IoT and DA to take accurate and timely decisions in terms of farm management and farm processes. The ability to automatically document health status of livestock or crop will provide efficient and effective diagnosis and prescription of medicine by veterinary or agriculture officer to farmers. This will help reduce loss. Also, with the use of IoT, supply chain of agri-food can be optimized. The use of the IoT in the supply chain will help to provide real time balancing between the demand and supply.

Awareness: IoT is expected to drive low cost applications and access to wireless network services in the agriculture sector. To this end, information on markets, prices, services can be accessed via mobile apps. Also, government services and regulatory standard regarding different farm produce can be made readily available. In addition, consumers who are interested in organic products and fresh products can easily locate farmers or be alerted when fresh products are available.

Asset Management: IoT will enable real time monitoring of farm assets and machinery against theft, replacement of parts, and for timely routine maintenance.