Coping with Farmers' Operational Challenges through Smart Agriculture

Chu, Siang Geng（China Productivity Center agricultural Innovation Department ）

On occasions of agricultural field surveys, farmers have often mentioned that climate anomalies in recent years have led to poor harvest or they are getting old but their sons and/or daughters have not planned to inherit farming. This reflects the main difficult conditions that challenge farming operation at present: impact of climate anomaly and aging of farming population. The two difficult conditions were also the two key issues frequently mentioned during the Multicountry Observational Study Mission on Digital Farming for Small-scale Farmers held by Asian Productivity Organization (APO) in 2022.

Particularly for climate abnormality, drought and flooding have successively happened in recent years, causing large damages to crops and rendering conventional farmers unable to cope with extreme climate conditions. To solve such problems, farmers have cooperated with high-tech companies to install micro weather stations and various sensors amid fields to collect and analyze environmental monitoring data for sending early warning on extreme climate conditions, with the devices linked to Line robots to make up a user-friendly early warning and inquiry platform. Besides, the smart management and decision-making system for pest control developed by Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute under Ministry of Agriculture can be used via link to Line robots to inquire about needed information and receive relevant message, familiarizing elderly farmers with new technologies quickly and facilitating promotion of the technologies. However, elderly farmers reflect another problem: aging of agricultural working population.

Smart farming machines are helpful for small-scale farmers’ operation

Aging of agricultural working population leads to shortage of farming labor and, in addition, renders it difficult to pass farming expertise and experience down to young generations. Many think that labor shortage is a problem related to utilization of man power or wage structure. This may be correct for large farming operators, but for small-scale farmers, optimal utilization of limited man power is essential and therefore use of smart farming machines becomes the only choice.

Application of smart agricultural technologies

Adoption of automated irrigation systems, automated farming machines and drone-based pesticide spraying can reduce labor cost incurred to farmers. For farmers, however, effects from innovation in tool and machine can be seen soon but inheritance of experience of farming takes long time. While there is not much difference in experience of using automated smart farming machines, the corresponding decision-making experience is difficult to pass down to young-generation users.

Inheritance of information by virtue of digital twin

Digital twin is a good choice for passing down the decision-making experience. In case of greenhouse management, sensors of temperatures, humidity, luminosity, soil moisture are installed to monitor the greenhouse environmental conditions and collect information on operators’ decision making such as optimal time to power on and off the electric fans, hoists and sprinkling systems. A digital twin can be thereby established to analyze the operating models or abnormal sensor data. Through using AI to model an operator’s behaviors, the digital twin can act just like the operator to make recommendations for other operators to make decisions in a bid to hike decision-making efficiency and pass on the experiences.

Conclusion

For problems existing to farming operation nowadays, smart agricultural technologies are undoubtedly a remedy. But, how to generally promote these technologies and corresponding tools to farmers as well as cost incurred and farmers’ willingness to adopt are likely to pose difficulties. The smart agricultural alliances and local farmers’ associations are supposed to serve as effective channels for promotion, while reduction in cost incurred to farmers would hinge on government subsidies, farmer loans or technological improvement. Regardless, amidst various agricultural challenges, the trend towards smart agriculture has become inevitable.