Weekly Progress Report

Research current problems in agriculture.

Collect 20 PDF articles from IEEE xplore digital library.

Create a list of problems with references

Keyword search (iot farming, iot agriculture, smart farming, smart agriculture, innovative agriculture)

I have found the articles now I need to start reading

Collected 36 in total

I downloaded textbooks and articles.  I now need to start reading and analysing these documents to see which ones are useful.  Also, research the problems in agriculture and references any good sources.

I downloaded a combination of 36 articles and textbooks using my keywords.  Next week I am going to start reading and referencing the problems in agriculture

Need to start reading

N (ongoing)

• Urbanisation
• Limited work force
• Degrading farmland
• Climate volatility

Also found some good quotes for my intro to the topic:

The value of all that is farmed in Australia has fallen to $58 billion, from $63.8 billion two years ago.

Despite increasing risks to trade, it forecast a recovery in the value of Australian agricultural production in 2019–20 to be worth around $59 billion, if seasonal conditions improved.

Farm produce values are then expected to hit $61 billion by 2023–24.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-03-05/value-of-australian-farm-production-drops-abares-figures/10867294

Found some excellent quantitative data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics:

10.5 million megalitres of water were used by Australian farming businesses in 2017-18.

2.3 million hectares of agricultural land was irrigated (up 2%)

9.7 million megalitres (ML) of water was used to irrigate crops and pastures (up 7%)

22 thousand farms applied water to their land (up 2%)

Pastures and crops accounted for most of the water used on Australian farms in 2017-18.

7.2 million megalitres were applied to Crops (69% of all water applied)

https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4618.0

The majority of Australians (71%) live in major cities with populations of 100,000 people or more.

https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Small%20Towns~113

The most commonly reported barriers were (Figure 1):

• Rising inputs costs (reported as a large or very large barrier by 63% of farmers)

• Drought (57%)

• Increased charges for permanent water entitlements (irrigators only, 56%)

• Lack of adequate telecommunications infrastructure (55%)

• Reduced water allocation (irrigators only, 55%)

• Falling prices for goods produced (52%)

• Increases in the costs of purchasing temporary water (irrigators only, 52%)

• Too many environmental regulations (45%)

• Pest, disease or weed invasion causing substantial damage (38%)

• Difficulty obtaining labour (33%)

• Lack of demand for goods produced (32%)

• Other natural disasters including flood, bushfire and storm damage (32%)

• Difficulty accessing affordable finance (27%)

• Difficulty transporting produce to market (23%).

In 2015, the most common farming challenges reported by Australian farmers were rising input costs, drought, increased water costs, lack of access to telecommunications, and reduced water allocation, with more than 55% of farmers reporting that one or more of these had prevented them running their farm they wanted to during the past three years.

https://www.canberra.edu.au/research/institutes/health-research-institute/regional-wellbeing-survey/survey-results/reports/2015-reports/Barriers-to-farm-development_26Oct2016.pdf

Top 5 strongest industries in Australia

Source: finder.com.au, Australian Bureau of Statistics ‘Labour Force’ report, February 2015

https://www.finder.com.au/press-release-careers-in-australia

10.5 million megalitres of water were used by Australian farming businesses in 2017-18.

2.3 million hectares of agricultural land was irrigated (up 2%)

9.7 million megalitres (ML) of water was used to irrigate crops and pastures (up 7%)

22 thousand farms applied water to their land (up 2%)

Pastures and crops accounted for most of the water used on Australian farms in 2017-18.

7.2 million megalitres were applied to Crops (69% of all water applied)

https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4618.0

The majority of Australians (71%) live in major cities with populations of 100,000 people or more.

https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Small%20Towns~113

Not much to report, I have completed and submitted the project proposal

I have collected 30 references including textbooks and journal articles from my search.  Over the next few weeks, I will be working through reading these articles

Theses are my 12 articles:

Ayaz, M., Ammad-Uddin, M., Sharif, Z., Mansour, A., & Aggoune, E. (2019). Internet-of-Things (IoT)-Based Smart Agriculture: Toward Making the Fields Talk. IEEE Access, 7, 129551-129583. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8784034&isnumber=8600701

Bauer, J., & Aschenbruck, N. (2018). Design and implementation of an agricultural monitoring system for smart farming. 2018 Iot Vertical And Topical Summit On Agriculture – Tuscany (IOT Tuscany), 1-6. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8373022&isnumber=8373016

Boobalan, J., Jacintha, V., Nagarajan, J., Thangayogesh, K., & Tamilarasu, T. (2018). An IOT Based Agriculture Monitoring System. 2018 International Conference On Communication And Signal Processing (ICCSP), 594-598. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8524490&isnumber=8523828

Dagar, R., Som, S., & Khatri, S. (2018). Smart Farming – IoT in Agriculture. 2018 International Conference On Inventive Research In Computing Applications (ICIRCA), 1052-1056. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8597264&isnumber=8596764

Grimblatt, V., Ferré, G., Rivet, F., Jego, C., & Vergara, N. (2019). Precision Agriculture for Small to Medium Size Farmers — An IoT Approach. 2019 IEEE International Symposium On Circuits And Systems (ISCAS), 1-5. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8702563&isnumber=8702066

Mahalakshmi J., Kuppusamy K., Kaleeswari C., & Maheswari P. (2019) IoT Sensor-Based Smart Agricultural System. In: Subramanian B., Chen SS., Reddy K. (eds) Emerging Technologies for Agriculture and Environment. Lecture Notes on Multidisciplinary Industrial Engineering, 39-52. Springer, Singapore

Mat, M., Mohd Kassim, A., & Yusoff, I. (2018). Smart Agriculture Using Internet of Things. 2018 IEEE Conference On Open Systems (ICOS), 54-59. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8632817&isnumber=8632697

Patil, K., & Kale, N. (2016). A model for smart agriculture using IoT. 2016 International Conference On Global Trends In Signal Processing, Information Computing And Communication (ICGTSPICC), 543-545. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7955360&isnumber=7955253

Sushanth, G., & Sujatha, S. (2018). IOT Based Smart Agriculture System. 2018 International Conference On Wireless Communications, Signal Processing And Networking (Wispnet), 1-4. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8538702&isnumber=8538438

Thorat, A., Kumari, S., & Valakunde, N. (2019). An IoT based smart solution for leaf disease detection. 2017 International Conference On Big Data, Iot And Data Science (BID), 193-198. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8336597&isnumber=8336563

Venkatesan, R., & Tamilvanan, A. (2017). A sustainable agricultural system using IoT. 2017 International Conference On Communication And Signal Processing (ICCSP), 763-767. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8286464&isnumber=8286342

Yule, I., & Pullanagari, R. (2016). Optical Sensors to Assist Agricultural Crop and Pasture Management. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278700271_Optical_Sensors_to_Assist_Agricultural_Crop_and_Pasture_Management

An example of my annotated bibliography:

Ayaz, M., Ammad-Uddin, M., Sharif, Z., Mansour, A., & Aggoune, E. (2019). Internet-of-Things (IoT)-Based Smart Agriculture: Toward Making the Fields Talk. IEEE Access, 7, 129551-129583. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8784034&isnumber=8600701

In this article Ayaz, Ammad-Uddin, Sharif, Mansour & Aggoune highlight the potential of a range of technologies that could be incorporated into an IoT based agricultural system.  The authors analyse an array of wireless sensors and the expected challenges of integrating these technologies with traditional farming processes.  Their research focuses on assessing wireless sensors, IoT tractors, harvesting robots, communication protocols, smartphones, cloud computing, UAV’s, food safety and food transportation and their potential application into current agricultural systems such as soil sampling, irrigation, fertiliser, crop disease, pest management, yield monitoring, forecasting and harvesting. The article is very useful to my research topic, as Ayaz et al. have concisely analysed the majority of the sensors I am considering to use in my solution.  The main limitation of the article is that it does not present an agricultural solution but rather reviews technology that could be used in a solution thus the authors need to research the use of the technologies they analysed in a real-world system to test their limitations as a complete integrated architecture.  This article will be useful in my research for supplementary information about wireless sensors.

My originality report is:

I was able to write my agricultural issues and literature review to suit the report

Not done, had 2 week break due to personal reasons, a bit behind but all good.

All done

Report is all done, just need to write a script, create the presentation and record the presentation