Talk Abstract: “IoT in Agriculture: Creating Access and Opportunity”

The safe cultivation, transportation and delivery of food is a growing concern for modern society. Climate uncertainty, volatility of markets, and the need to meet the food production requirements of a rising global population is increasing the need for comprehensive data collection, increased access to data as well as a more complex fusion and analysis of data. In the agricultural sector, the world is turning to IoT, combined with data analytics, to address the growing concerns of the food supply’s quantity and quality. An IoT evolution is happening within the agricultural sector, including wireless sensor networks, radio frequency (RF) identification, cloud computing, middleware systems, and end-user applications. Despite these recent technological breakthroughs, adoption of new technologies has lagged due to fragmented solutions, interoperability issues, lack of trust in data exchange, and barriers from lack of multi-disciplinary approaches. The current process of collecting, storing, analyzing, and distributing data and information to support decision making in agricultural operations remains fragmented or inaccessible to too many stakeholders. In addition, the efficient use of IoT depends on the Internet infrastructure, and this presents several shortcomings, especially when dealing with rural and remote locations, large numbers of network devices and/or integrating devices with other, legacy systems. In this talk, Dr. McNair discusses the current state of IoT Agriculture research as well as the access and integration needs for various stakeholders, and what technological next steps are needed to form a bridge between the two communities.