Introduction

In the modern world, when new technologies are emerging rapidly the need has arisen to be smart in agriculture too. India is a land of agriculture, ranking second worldwide in farm productivity. Before the advancement in the technology, farmers used to manually irrigate their lands which was a time-​consuming process as well as required more water supply. Because of consuming more time, it resulted in crop drying. Also, there were many other problems like uneven ploughing problem, intruder attacks and temperature effect on crops. All of these factors result in low productivity, and farmers had to bear lots of losses. Due to the rapid increase in population, the production of food should also be doubled in the next few years. It will be a great challenge to fulfill this need with limited resources.

To increase food productivity, traditional agricultural systems need to be upgraded. There is a dire need to incorporate the upcoming and latest tools and technologies in agriculture which will fulfill the food requirements while making agriculture fully developed and automated. To satisfy the developing need of water systems in India, because of its questionable climatic conditions, it is important to concentrate on supporting water systems and improving the proficiency of the current water system frameworks. The present population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 9.7 billion in future. The world will consequently need to produce 70% more food in future so that the growing population can be fed. So, farmers need to move to new technologies so that they can meet the growing demand of food production in the world. Making farming smarter is an emerging concept that helps to manage farms by making use of latest technologies to increase the yields along with the quality.

Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized as an arrangement of interrelated processing gadgets, mechanical and advanced machines, items, creatures or individuals that are given a kind of identifiers having capability of data transfer over network with no need of human-​to-​human or human-​to-​computer interaction. It can also be thought of as a network that connects things to the internet through particular algorithms provided by remote sensors, microcontrollers and actuators. The exchange of information and communication is done such that intelligent recognition, tracking, positioning, monitoring, management and control can take place. Hence, using smart agriculture the losses in irrigation water and fertilizer can be reduced. It can also provide a favorable climate in terms of humidity and temperature to increase the production of crops in the farm. Real-​time monitoring of temperature and humidity plays an important role in various fields of agriculture. Technology related to IoT is designed to guarantee the better growth of crops in optimum conditions. This advancement in technology will lead to progress in agriculture, and it will also be helpful in solving many future problems of agriculture.

Before the evolution of IoT, many researchers worked in the field of precision agriculture and all making use of mainly wireless sensor networks to collect data from various sensors and then return back over the wireless protocol. The data coming from various sensors provide information on different environmental factors. The difficulties faced in analyzing environmental factors could not be provided a satisfactory and correct solution to increase the productivity of crops. There are certain factors which affect productivity if not taken under observation. To resolve these issues, an advanced system should be developed so that productivity and quality can be increased. This system should have features like monitoring, analysis and automation in agriculture. However, these combined and integrated systems are difficult to achieve in agriculture and farming because of many problems. The development of combined and integrated systems has many challenges in logical research, so they are not accessible to farmers. The objective of IoT in smart agriculture is to implement smart system by making use of available resources to enhance productivity. All these features and technologies will provide a support to build a sustainable and productive farming and agriculture system to enter the fourth industrial revolution.

Further, in the coming years combining farming system with IoT can play a key role in increasing the productivity. Production of food needs to be enhanced in future to satisfy the imminent food demand. Water is also a factor of concern as resources are becoming scarcer day by day. Optimal utilization of limited water resources and reducing water wastage is a challenge. In addition, factors that increase yields like an improved ploughing method and reducing crop loss by intruder prevention are also a matter of great concern. At the end integration of IoT technology with automation of farming procedures can solve all the impending agricultural hazards. Using IoT farmers can constantly monitor the field and weather conditions from anywhere making use of internet. So, farmers will be able to observe the important field conditions in real time and then make a comparison with the previous available data on the server. So the focus of applying IoT in agriculture is to make farmers’ tasks automated which include tasks like ploughing, irrigation, bird repelling and also soil moisture monitoring, rainwater harvesting, temperature monitoring. The server provides other data that play a very important role for analyzing and monitoring the entire farm on real-​time basis. By exposing automation and IoT in agriculture, farmers can save time and money. That will be very helpful for increasing production.

Conventional greenhouses used manual intervention for monitoring and controlling parameters which resulted in misinterpretations and increased costs. However, IoT-​driven smart greenhouses can brilliantly screen and control the atmosphere automatically. Different sensors are deployed to quantify the ecological parameters as per the particular necessities of the yield. That information is put away in a cloud-​based processing unit for providing information. Importantly, IoT-​based farming not only has a huge scope in cultivating activities, it can serve agribusinesses like organic cultivation, family cultivation, including rearing of specific cows, and additionally developing explicit cultures, safeguarding specific or top-​quality varieties and so on. IoT encompasses a system of sensors, actuators, cameras, robots, drones and other associated gadgets which bring a remarkable degree of control to farming. This smart farming revolution reduces pesticide and manure use while increasing their effectiveness. IoT innovations will empower better food traceability, which thus will prompt to increase food safety. Smart farming is mainly based on IoT which integrates smart machines and sensors on farms to make cultivation information driven and data enabled. Smart farming provides a practical approach to increase agricultural production, based on a precise and resource-​efficient approach.