Climate Smart Agricultural Prediction for Rural Small-Scale Farmers Using Internet of Things

Agriculture is one of the sectors that contribute to the development of the country as it is also a basic source of livelihood for people in rural areas. With an increase in the population, the demand for food also increases. As a result, agriculture is unable to meet this demand because of climate change affecting productivity. Climate change which is a long-term shift in weather pattern impact on the environment has made it difficult to produce enough to accommodate the growing population. To overcome this problem smart Agriculture is adopted. Smart agriculture is making use of IoT devices. The Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role in weather prediction since accuracy is crucial to produce crops. However, the adoption of smart agriculture is still in the very early stages, especially in the rural areas of developing nations. Despite some level of awareness about climate issues regarding agriculture especially in the developed countries, in the rural areas of developing nations, the small-scale farmers have little or no knowledge about climate change which impacts their productivity. This article presents a general review of the innovation and technologies in smart agriculture using IoT. This paper also discusses the IoT-based commercial solutions developed for smart farming. Based on the review of these existing works and commercial products, a conclusion can be drawn that key challenges and future scope of research in this domain are found. One of the findings is that all the existing solutions or the proposed solutions cater to developed nations and financially stable and big farmers less to rural small-scale farmers. As the methods that they are currently using to predict the weather condition due to recent climate change, these methods' prediction accuracy is very low. Hence, there is a need to further explore other approaches that can be adopted by small-scale farmers for highly accurate weather prediction which this study aims to achieve.