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. 2023 Nov 21;9(12):e22601.
doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e22601. eCollection 2023 Dec.

Application of digital technologies for ensuring agricultural productivity

Rambod Abiri  1 , Nastaran Rizan  2 , Siva K Balasundram  2 , Arash Bayat Shahbazi  3 , Hazandy Abdul-Hamid  1   4
Affiliations

Application of digital technologies for ensuring agricultural productivity

Rambod Abiri et al. Heliyon. .

Abstract

Over the decades, agri-food security has become one of the most critical concerns in the world. Sustainable agri-food production technologies have been reliable in mitigating poverty caused by high demands for food. Recently, the applications of agri-food system technologies have been meaningfully changing the worldwide scene due to both external strengths and internal forces. Digital agriculture (DA) is a pioneering technology helping to meet the growing global demand for sustainable food production. Integrating different sub-branches of DA technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation and robotics, sensors, Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics into agriculture practices to reduce waste, optimize farming inputs and enhance crop production. This can help shift from tedious operations to continuously automated processes, resulting in increasing agricultural production by enabling the traceability of products and processes. The application of DA provides agri-food producers with accurate and real-time observations regarding different features influencing their productivity, such as plant health, soil quality, weather conditions, and pest and disease pressure. Analyzing the results achieved by DA can help agricultural producers and scholars make better decisions to increase yields, improve efficiency, reduce costs, and manage resources. The core focus of the current work is to clarify the benefits of some sub-branches of DA in increasing agricultural production efficiency, discuss the challenges of practical DA in the field, and highlight the future perspectives of DA. This review paper can open new directions to speed up the DA application on the farm and link traditional agriculture with modern farming technologies.

Keywords: Big data; Digital agriculture; Digital technology; Internet of things; Smart farming.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The fundamental components of DA from cell phone to blockchain technology.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
A) Schematic demonstration of field measurement and data collection using a wireless sensor network and B) IoT monitoring and cloud-based data analysis.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Data and information flow along the food value chain.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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