Smallholder Agriculture in the Information Age: Limits and Opportunities

Abstract

Recent projections by the United Nations show that the food production needs to double by 2050 in order to meet the nutrition demand of the world's growing population. A key enabler of this growth are smallholder family farms, that form the backbone of agricultural (AG) production worldwide. To meet this increasing demand, smallholder farms need to implement critical advances in task management and coordination, crop and livestock monitoring and efficient farming practices. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will play a critical role in these advances by providing integrated and affordable cyber-physical systems (CPS) that can longitudinally measure, analyze and control AG operations. In this paper we make headway towards the design and integration of such AG-CPS. We begin by characterizing the information and communication technology demand of smallholder agriculture based on traffic analysis of farm Internet use. Our findings inform the design and integration of an end-to-end AG-CPS called FarmNET that provides (i) robust control mechanisms for multi-sensor AG data collection and fusion, (ii) wide-area, heterogeneous wireless networks for ubiquitous farm connectivity, (iii) algorithms and models for farm data analytics that produce actionable information from the collected agricultural data, and (iv) control mechanisms for autonomous, proactive farming.