Sensors and Innovation!

R&D in agriculture is not keeping pace with current requirements which are evident from the rising yield gap, lack of adoption of precision and smart farming techniques, and lower application of advance sciences in agriculture.

Beyond a point, investment alone does not spur growth and we need productivity improvements through innovation.

Sensors are eyes and whose success relies on advances in the “PPPVRS” (Power, Performance, Price, Volume, Reliability, and Security). Making sensors smarter is a necessity to reliably gather the right parameters.

Connected objects for farming automation will require high performance, low cost, energy efficient microelectronic components for Radio Frequency (RF) communication. Depending on other countries for such essential technology would risk safety, performance, security problems, delays and loss of relevance, or an uncertainty in the supply of critical components.

Processing of a huge amount of data in agri-food operations under variable physical and chemical constraints in a changing climate and transforming them into actionable items is challenging. Developing components for recording, transformation, transmission and processing of information are the building blocks for security, safety and efficiency of smart farming, water management, post harvest, farm to consumer, and novel farming systems.

Since Smart Sensors are used to continuously monitor the environment, energy-efficient technologies are a crucial contribution to these sensor systems.

UN stated that food production will need to jump by 70% to keep pace with a rising global population that’s projected to cross the nine billion mark by 2050. Crop monitoring is a key part of achieving this goal. Traditional soil testing and visual inspections of crops are expensive and time-consuming, being replaced by low-resolution satellite data and sensor-equipped drones and tractors. The benefits of Ag-Tech are well known but deploying the technology can be quite an intricate and costly affair.