What is Digital Agriculture?

livemint.com:

transforming farming practices across the world. Digital agriculture is an umbrella term for any type of farming or agronomic methods that integrate digital technologies (including information communication technologies) and analytics. Successfully utilizing these technologies can deliver a wide range of benefits at both a macro and micro level.

Digital agriculture is already delivering innovations at field level, in research labs, and across the entire food production spectrum. If our grandparents or great grandparents could see a modern high tech farm in action, they would be astounded. Anybody who was involved in agriculture in the 1950s or 1960s might think that they’d wandered onto the set of a new science fiction movie.

Modern digital agriculture solutions include the use of UAVs to monitor growing crops, and spray them with fertilizer and pesticides. In some high tech greenhouses, AI-driven robotics are capable of identifying ripe tomatoes on a plant and selectively harvesting them. Networks of remote (weatherproof) sensors provide agricultural professionals with precise real time data about crop health and biomass, phenological development, and almost every relevant growth metric.

This allows informed decision making about irrigation and nutrition, and the improvement of final crop yields. During vulnerable periods prior to harvest, ‘laser scarecrows’ operated by sensors can deter avian predators and reduce expensive crop losses. Changing weather patterns and freak weather events have always posed a threat to harvests and food supplies.