Challenges to Precision Agriculture (PA)

The benefits of PA do not appear immediately. A farmer, who invests money, wants to see immediate change but he needs some historical data to see the new changes. There are always chances of malware and viruses as the data reside on third party devices. It is difficult to detect and remove these attacks. By using PA techniques agriculture becomes more and more mainstream and things are become more automated. A lot percentage of the labors lose their jobs. Other sectors should have capacity to absorb this labor.

Increasing more smart and electronic devices means more electronic waste. In 2013 the total volume of electronic waste was in exceed of 52 million metric tons. PA consists of many connected devices. One malfunction sensor or hardware can result serious damage to crops productivity. Even a few minutes of power failure result in serious consequences particularly when backup power is not available. Backup power mean more resources and money need which can result in increased cost. PA needs heavy data center and gateways / hubs for the operations of smart sensors and other devices which can lead to heavy energy consumption.

PA concept is still relatively a new trend. There are only few firms in the market who involves making equipment. Low rate of competitiveness of the market can prevent new firm from entering this domain.

Many farmers have habit of considering their farm as one unit / Zone. PA farm is divided into different zones which bases on varying soil quality and fertilizer requirements. There is not much reference work for farmers to go by, while trying to divide their land into these zones. As an alternative many farmers continue to follow uniform fertilizers.

PA consists of big data which needs to be monitored by farmer on daily, weekly and monthly basis. This is almost impossible to look into large amount of data. Farmers don’t know which layer of data they should look and which should be ignored.

There are some cutting edge technologies involved in PA which are difficult to understand for less qualified farmer. Lack of knowledge before implementing these technologies could be dangerous. Many remote locations across the world specially the rural area in many developing countries do not have fast internet facilities. PA always depends on gateways/ sensor which communicate with cloud. High speed of internet availability is mandatory. Different type of tools, platforms have different standards for interpret-ability which could result in lack of uniformity in final analysis