The arrival of new technological solutions applicable to agriculture has enabled agricultural businesses to incorporate new monitoring and control tools into their production processes. This has been possible thanks to some facilities such as:
LPWAN enabling cheaper connectivity
Agricultural applications usually involve hostile environments of heat and humidity that may damage electronic devices, limited access to energy and connection range, for which multiple technologies have emerged that combine different approaches to provide solutions within the framework of the internet of things
Long-range networks and low power consumption or LPWAN favor the installation of devices that have feasible life cycles of more than one year with a single charge since they remain "sleeping" the vast majority of the time. This is impossible in other types of technologies already known as 3G/4G, to be power-sufficient, which increases the prices of connectivity, hardware, and installation, reducing the scalability of old solutions.
Among LPWAN technologies spectrum, LoRa, Sigfox, Nb-IoT protocols are the most known nowadays. Where solutions have been developed to fit the purpose, scope, and budget of the end-user. In addition to this, a large number of existing sensors and hardware on the market and the possibility of generating personalized integrations thanks to the flexibility of these IoT technologies have popularized the deployment of intelligent solutions available to farmers.
Low-cost platforms and pay per traffic
The collection or monitoring of data related to agricultural processes does not make sense until they are interpreted and analyzed by a platform that allows you to gather intelligence about them and allows you to present the information through an intuitive interface to its end-user.
These types of platforms that support IoT applications have been migrating from being an independent component on a server or client-side hardware to being managed from cloud environments, allowing data availability from anywhere in the world through a web interface.
These types of platforms are usually as a set of microservices in the cloud that work together to give meaning to a specific application, with the advantage that usually under this model you pay only as the services are used, they are also managed by large companies such as Amazon, Google, IBM or Microsoft, which allows the generation of low-cost solutions with ease of scaling and availability.
