Recent trends in agriculture

Agriculture is the most commonly practiced business in India. Agriculture sector contributes around 16% in India's GDP. With the everchanging world the agriculture sector is growing rapidly as other sectors in the country. Modern and more precise techniques are being used by farmers to increase their productivity in farming. Farmers, scientists and other developers are continuously spending more and more time and money to invent and develop different techniques to bring out more production of the crops from a smaller part of the land.

Various techniques are already used by farmers such as multiple cropping, soil testing, regenerative agriculture, etc. Now in 2020, a lot of technological changes have been made in farming, which definitely are improving farm profitability and at the same time touching environmental sustainability. Various techniques such as Artificial Intelligence, IoT (Internet of Things) are being used by the farmers which make their work easier and at the same time increase profits.

Let us now see a few major practices in the agricultural sector in detail:

1.      IoT (Internet of things):

IoT smart farming is a system that is built for monitoring the crop in the fields with the help of sensors and automating the irrigation system. The farmers can access the devices in the farms from anywhere. They give necessary inputs to the devices installed in the farm easily from any place. It is a capital intensive and a hi-tech system but with the correct use can help the farmers increase their profitability and to uplift other trends that are used in farming. Following are the applications of IoT in farming:

a.      Precision Farming

b.      Agricultural Drones

c.      Livestock Monitoring

d.      Smart Greenhouses

2.      Climate risk mitigation strategy:

Climate change is on high priority list. There is a need of effective climate risk mitigation strategy for effective water management, adopting to rising temperature, facing drought situations etc. The devices which can sense the upcoming climate changes and warning the farmers in prior can play a vital role in minimizing the risk involved in changing climatic conditions. Artificial Intelligence plays an important role in such devices. The efforts to sense and adopt to climatic changes is must to earn long term profits for the farming and the trading community.

3.      Machine learning and analytics:

Machine learning and advanced analytics are being used to mine data for trends in every sector, and agriculture is no exception. These can be applied before seed planting with plant breeders. Machine learning can predict which traits and genes will be best for crop production, giving farmers the best breed for their location and climate. At the field level, machine learning techniques that use satellite data to distinguish between crops, like corn and soy, providing valuable information for crop insurance, logistics, and commodity markets. The intersection of robotics and data from an increasingly connected farm will accelerate this trend even further.

4.      Blockchain:

Blockchain is one of the most recent trends that is been used in the industries to increase the transparency and efficiency of the supply chain. The block prototypes will help the farmers to export the grains and other crops easily and with the use of zero paperwork. This will also increase the speed of the transaction. The blockchain prototypes will make sure that the quality of the crops that are being send are as per the request and no manual checking will be required at the time of trading or freight forwarding.

5.      Biological techniques:

During the period of green revolution, increasing application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides were encouraged extensively in order to meet the growing demand for food required to feed the rising population. Rising population, ever-increasing demand for food and unlimited exploitation, of natural resources have created a grave threat to the environment as well as to the agricultural sector. In order to save and protect the environment as well as the agricultural sector from any further damage, increasing use of biological technology for agricultural operation has been emphasised and more emphasis is being given to develop new biological technology.