Agritech - Introduction

Agritech or Agricultural technology refers to use of technology in agriculture, horticulture, and aquaculture for making farming more productive, sustainable, and efficient.

What is Agritech?

Agritech is union of two words i.e agriculture and technology. It focus on improving yield quality, quantity and profitability. It helps in producing healthy foods as it makes use of less fertilizers and also prevents soil degradation and improves water management. It makes use of drones, GPS and iot based sensors allowing to monitor crop health, field surveillance and gather weather report. Technologies like automated irrigation techniques enhance water availability, Big data helps in strategizing and managing yields, blockchain helps farmers to connect directly with consumers, solar panels helps in solving power issues.

Agritech in Farming

Agricultural technology plays a very important role in farming. By using various technologies farmers can increase their productivity by investing low inputs with minimum loss. Agritech can help in farming in following ways:

• It makes use of Precision farming to monitor crops health and soil condition.
• Robotic and automation makes the work more efficient eliminating labor shortage problem. Several devices such as drones and autonomous tractors reduce the workload of human labors while saving the time and money.
• Drones can be used for surveillance, crop monitoring and also spraying insecticides and pesticides.
• Autonomous tractors can help in planting, plowing, sowing and harvesting with higher efficiency than humans.
• Smart irrigation systems can be used for efficient usage of water as per need of crops minimizing water wastage.
• IoT sensors collects data of crops health and soil moisture content and use previous data to apply right amount of chemicals and other resources for different types of crops.

Challenges in Agritech

• Cost: Initial cost of equipments, machineries, and softwares can be expensive and may not be affordable for small farmers.
• Losses of Job: It may lead to job losses of people by using machineries. For example earlier people used to manually reap the cops but now harvesters can be used to harvest the crops.
• Lack of Space: Machineries can take up a lot of space which raises concerns about where to keep these equipments and can be difficult to transport.
• Lack of Infrastructure: Lack of infrastructure, such as roads, railways, and public markets hinders the connectivity to market place while lack of reliable power sources and internet hinders integration of technologies relying on data connectivity.
• Loss of Traditional Knowledge: Relying too much on technology can lead to loss of Knowledge of traditional methods used in agriculture.
• Environmental Impact: All the equipments and machineries uses fuel to operate. Emission from these machineries can lead to air pollution, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions.
• Complexity of Implementation: It is very complex to adapt to new technologies for farmers due to skills gap. They will require proper training and education to operate new technologies. Farmers use their traditional method and adapting to these new technologies can be difficult.