Precision farming would become ‘decision farming’. From an M2M perspective, the agricultural sector is still considered a minor sector. However, M2M technologies and all the technologies around the Internet of Things vision are key enablers for the transformation of the agricultural sector towards the smart farming vision. The more immediate impact of M2M technologies in agriculture are around providing remote connectivity between sensors in the field and farm information management systems. However we anticipate that the use of sensors in farming will spread to adjunct areas, such as environmental monitoring, land management, the greater public focus on issues such as food safety and wildlife preservation. For these reasons, we believe that the use of precision agriculture is bound to grow,not least because of the urgency of the problems the world faces regrading food security in the long term. However, because the technology is in its infancy and not widely understood, this growth will be slow at first compared with sensor based technologies in other industries. This is because of the lack of a vision shared by all stakeholders and their governments as to how to bring together the needs of agriculture with business opportunities. In our report, Beecham Research supplies some forecasts for global wireless and satellite M2M connections from 2012 to 2020.
It is also important to learn the lessons from other large scale ‘smart’ project rollouts, notably the smart metering projects ongoing in European countries. These are aimed for completion or near completion by around 2020, with smart meters replacing existing ones in homes and business premises. The UK government for one is taking great pains to ensure that a full regulatory framework exists to support the programme and that the full legal implications are understood. These touch on customer privacy, ownership of the data collected, and whether it is permissible for this data to be repurposed for other uses. These issues are equally relevant to the agriculture industry. A similar framework needs to be implemented to reap the best advantages from ‘smart farming’.