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TECHNOLOGY
Although technology comes with its fair share of challenges of affordability and a lack of widespread acceptance, it is highly poised to be Africa’s answer to achieving food security.
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Internet of Things to pave the way
SoilMeter by FarmSens is designed for in-site measurement of preconfigured soil conditions.
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FRICA HAS SEEN major growth, in terms of population, and according to a research firm Statista, it is poised to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. With a growing population, come challenges discernible to the continent, which already faces issues such as food production and food security. Stakeholders and industry experts opine technology is the way to move forward. It brings key modern-world aspects such as precision and efficiency into the picture,
MyFarmWeb collects data using multiple sensors placed across designated farmlands and uses data collated centrally, which can be accessed through a web page or a mobile app. 30 African Farming - March/April 2022
from which the continent can certainly benefit. One of the technologies largely in focus in modern day technological revolutions is the Internet of Things (IoT). As the Australian State body Agriculture Victoria stated, the Internet of Things (IoT) is about making “dumb” things “smart” by connecting them to each other and to the internet. It enables the sensing and control of objects that are remote, facilitating opportunities for direct integration between the physical aspects and computing systems. In agriculture, this simply means that IoT can enable a farmer to remotely monitor produce in a timely fashion and take precise decisions to achieve the end result. Taking climate change and discrepancies in water supply into consideration, monitoring systems are starting to play a vital role in maintaining farms around the world. IoT is enabling farmers to access agricultural data such as maps and allied information on their computers or rather more
conveniently, at their fingertips with the help of mobile phones. IoT-based farming technology provider MyFarmWeb collects data using multiple sensors placed across designated farmlands and uses data collated centrally, which can be accessed through a web page or a mobile app. Data at the fingertips According to MyFarmWeb, the system is an interactive cloud-based platform, accessed through a browser or a mobile app, for storing, visualising and comparing all types of maps, geographic and IoT-generated agricultural data, which can be crucial for making decisions that can hugely impact the quality of food production. The app also gives farmers access to farm generated maps and point data for single-layer analysis and is focused on infield orientated decision making through the GPS function. The company claims that the mobile
www.africanfarming.net
