Precision Agriculture is Positioned for Massive Growth in 2023

Thursday, January 5, 2023

Source | IoT Evolution World

One of the most exciting areas in IoT innovation is growing in vineyards, farm fields, and greenhouses. According to Emergen Research, the global IoT in the agriculture market is expected to register a CAGR of 11.4% with revenue projected to increase from $11.2 billion to $26.65 billion from 2021-2030. Significant investments by prominent market participants are one of the major factors driving market revenue growth.

The challenges for agriculture businesses, whether they are massive production farms, or vineyards growing table grapes, raisins, or wine grapes, are significant.

The greatest challenge that climate change brings to winemaking is unpredictability, said Karen MacNeil, a wine expert living in Napa Valley and author of The Wine Bible. In an article published by the Atlantic, MacNeil was quoted as saying, “Producers used to know which varieties to grow, how to grow them, when to harvest the berries, and how to ferment them to produce a consistent, quality wine—but today, every step is up in the air. This growing recognition is spurring researchers and winemakers to find ways to preserve beloved grape varieties and their unique qualities under the shifting and capricious conditions of today’s warming world.”

Going beyond R&D, this week, precision agriculture technology company Opti-Harvest announced it selected Veea, a provider of integrated smart edge connectivity, computing, and security technologies for edge and cloud, to bring a comprehensive range of solutions to growers. This comes after having implemented several projects over the last few years.

This teaming agreement will bring end-to-end climate-smart technology, products, and full solutions that help farmers maximize yield, optimize land and labor resources, and increase water use efficiency.

“We are thrilled to be partnered with Veea in this important initiative,” said Jodd Readick, CTO of Precision Ag, Opti-Harvest. “Working closely with Veea’s highly skilled team, we are excited to create innovative solutions with high ROI to demanding problems. Partnering with Veea enables us to provide a complete, fully managed, and cost-effective solution encompassing powerful edge computing and flexible data connectivity services to major growers around the world.”

“Veea is committed to working with Opti-Harvest to develop this advanced, connected solution to monitor critical data streams for crops in the field and create new value from this digital transformation,” said Mark Tubinis, Chief Commercial Officer, Veea. “Food security is one of the most significant social challenges today, as is the dramatic climate change, which is impacting the ability for farmers to improve yields, assure quality, and operate profitably. With precision agriculture techniques, we can intelligently address everything from water consumption to soil and nutrients management beyond indoor growing facilities, where AgTech has seen its earliest successes. By augmenting Opti-Harvest’s sunlight optimization products with sensors and data collected from those sensors shipped into local and cloud applications, we can change the game and make sustainable contributions to the farming industry, to the communities those farms are part of, and quality of life for millions.”

Opti-Harvest’s patented Opti-Filter agricultural technology and Opti-View precision farming platforms enable commercial growers of high-value specialty crops to better utilize sunlight, the planet’s most fundamental, renewable, and free natural resource. Opti-Filter is a patented light filtration technology that maximizes the sun’s most productive rays, filtering out those that inhibit growth.

Opti-View, a unique Agricultural Intelligence technology, collects and processes critical environmental, yield, irrigation, and labor data to enable the promise of precision agriculture. VeeaHubs are key infrastructure components for Opti-View functionality and deployments. The VHH09-4GL VeeaHub model offers a wide range of connectivity and expansion options for enterprise-grade, demanding applications and, in the case of Opti-Harvest, supports LoRaWAN and 4G LTE. Veea’s vMesh WiFi optimizes performance in the field, picking up signals from LoRa sensors and generating essential data that will be used to create powerful predictive analytics that farmers can use in real-time.

Typical deployments include various commercial off-the-shelf and proprietary sensors that send data to VeeaHubs wirelessly, which in turn sends data to the cloud over public or private 4G or 5G connections, feeding a variety of cloud systems. The data collected by VeeaHubs makes its way to the Opti-View portal with an intuitive admin experience and ultimately to AI and ML systems for advanced analytics, presentation, and reporting.

According to a 2022 market research report by MarketsandMarkets, the precision farming market is expected to grow from USD 8.5 billion in 2022 to USD 15.6 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 7.9%.

Beyond changing weather patterns, stronger and more well-funded government initiatives will increase demand and support for more accurate farming techniques to yield greater crop production.

According to the report, the main drivers for this expected growth are a shortage of skilled labor, increasing strain of global food supplies, and growing farm mechanization activities by farming concerns.