Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1423208
www.lora-alliance.org THE FARMING OF TOMORROW IS ALREADY HERE: HOW LoRaWAN ® TECHNOLOGY SUPPORTS SMART AGRICULTURE & PRECISE ANIMAL PRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Recent extreme incidents around the globe—famine, climate change, wildfires, tornados, droughts, floods, and pandemics—remind us that farmers are facing two major challenges: to feed the planet and sustain the environment. The balance between conducting intensive or extensive production to feed an ever growing population and respecting our environment and usage of natural resources is a line not to be crossed. In other words, Earth's resources are finite and we have to learn how to respect the planet if we want to keep living on it. Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, we have witnessed major changes in agricultural processes leading to what we call "precision agriculture", or Smart Farming. Precision agriculture means that animals get precisely the food, care or treatment they need at the right moment, determined with great accuracy thanks to the latest technology. Precision agriculture allows actions to be taken per square meter or even per plant for optimal production and sustainable crops.* In animal production, farmers have to increase their daily production with more environmentally friendly inputs and less manpower while ensuring less greenhouse gas emission, animal welfare, and answering the customer's need for complete traceability and quality assessment from farm to fork. With approximately 1.5 million cattle and nearly 978 million pigs being bred around the world (source: http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QA), these complex demands cannot be met without the help of new technologies, such as the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Here are a few examples of the wide variety of use cases implemented today: • Connected scales can randomly weigh the animals in the building to get an idea of their average weight. Individual tracking is too expensive in this type of production and would not make sense as it is impossible or too costly to implement an individual correction per animal. • In the swine industry, individual monitoring solutions can be implemented on sows for their welfare or to optimize the reproduction by pig/hog, but will generally be monitored at the group level; ambient monitoring, noise, behavior analysis, unless associated with automatic handling systems to scale and sort the animals according to, for instance, their weight. • For beef production, when animals are only handled a couple of times per year and are left grazing in extensive pastures for most of the time, tracking solutions become very useful to monitor the location of the herd, to identify abnormal behavior of an animal compared to the herd or, in some cases, to detect theft. Moreover, besides animals, there are plenty of assets to track on farms. From preventive maintenance on LoRa Alliance ® and LoRaWAN ® are registered trademarks. Used with permission. ©2020 LoRa Alliance ® N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 0 *For more information on this, read our White Paper: WHY LoRaWAN IS THE LOGICAL CHOICE FOR CROP PRODUCTION MONITORING SOLUTIONS