Smart Agricultural Orchards: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Catherine Yang and Version 1 by Kittisak Jermsittiparsert.

The capability of IoT technology has also been used with regularity in agriculture, especially the smart agriculture orchard concept by applying IoT with the sensor nodes to operate independently and construct a network infrastructure in an ad-hoc manner. In the aspect of research regarding smart agriculture production, an IoT-based WSN has been used to observe the condition of the yields and automate precision agriculture by using various sensors.

  • smart energy node
  • agricultural orchard
  • Internet of Things

1. Sustainable Energy Management

To make the country drive and develop sustainable business operations in various sectors would require the introduction of new technologies to assist in the management. At present, the problem of energy costs has resulted in less net income from the agricultural and tourism sectors. As a result, people in countries that practice both agriculture and tourism are still impoverished. A tangible way to reduce the costs of the agricultural and tourism businesses would be through sustainable energy management. Sustainable energy is energy that does not affect the environment and people, and the energy itself can be used for a long period of time with a limited budget. This includes solar energy, wind energy, marine energy, biomass energy, or geothermal energy [1,17][1][2].
To solve environmental problems effectively, the transition from traditional energy systems to sustainable energy systems would be essential [17][2]. Achieving a successful energy transition would require the people to change their energy habits and take more sustainable actions in a wide variety of areas. In particular, they would need to exhibit attenuation behavior (e.g., turn down the heater), efficiency behavior (e.g., adopt energy-saving devices), adopt sustainable energy sources; such as, wind or solar, and change when using energy at a sustainable production time with the existing energy [18][3]. One way to encourage people to adopt sustainable energy behavior is to develop and implement policies to promote this behavior, which would be essential for the policies to be successful in a democratic society. Public acceptance of the policies would be important. This is because low publicly accepted energy policies may be delayed, canceled, or even have repercussions [19][4].
Moreover, the energy management of the IOT/WSN nodes was presented as a new energy-saving centroid routing protocol (EECRP) to manage the power of the WSN-assisted IoT by solving the spacing-dependent clustering problem. From the power center [20][5], this also offered an optimization algorithm based on the number of idle nodes and the number of cluster head nodes. Based on the simulation results, when the BS was in the network location, the EECRP could transmit large amounts of data at very low power dissipation. Simultaneously, the network lifetime of the EECRP was longer than that of the LEACH, LEACH-C, and GEEC. Future work would attempt to improve the protocol by routing the multi-hop paths from the CH to BS nodes. Using the CH node to transmit the data packets, it is hoped that their future protocols would be able to do so when the BS is out of the network [21][6]. In addition, Zhang et al. [22][7] presented the IEA EHWSN global platform, which provided an optimal power management mechanism for intermittent operation. At a minimal level in an environment without energy harvesting, this could measure the power levels with accuracy of 99.89%, consume only 157 µW, and support strong EH WSN. As for the node performance and cost, the IEA platform used the COT components, so the IEA was not only an experimental platform for the EH-WSN, but also a cost-effective tool to use [23][8].

2. Smart Agriculture for Supporting Community-Based Tourism to Sustainability

Smart agriculture orchards and smart farming are the applications of computer technology; such as, sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) and communication systems like the Internet to be used to aid farming and to ensure accurate management, save labor, and reduce costs in various fields. This could also create a point of interest for the community in terms of creating new learning attractions.
According to the ‘Agriculture 2050′ program, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)has projected that the global population would reach approximately 10 billion by the end of 2050 [24][9]. Therefore, food production should increase approximately by at least 70% to support this population growth [25][10]. As such, there is an urgent need to improve crop yields, so precision farming and smart farming are very important in today’s world. In this regard, technologies related to smart agriculture that include robotics, AI, information and communication technology (ICT), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), deep learning (DL), IoT, and big data analytics could effectively address the challenges involved. This would have a positive effect in terms of reducing food scarcity and resource loss [26][11].

3. Research Areas for Smart Agriculture Orchards to Support Community-Based Tourism (CBT)

The research team selected the area in Kantharalak district, Sisaket province, Thailand. This is located in the Northeastern region of Thailand, and was selected as the research area because it is a district where most of the population is engaged in agriculture. There is an environment suitable for orchards, while there are natural attractions and historical landmarks, which support both agriculture and natural tourism. In this regard, the famous fruit of Kantharalak district and Sisaket province is “volcanic durian”(Figure 2Figure 1). and this is the only place in the world where this species of the fruit can be found.
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Figure 21.
Volcanic durian in Kantharak district Sisaket province.
However, even though durian is an important fruit of Kantharalak district, Sisaket province that can generate income of several million Thai Baht per year for agriculturists, it is a fruit that requires close care such as, regular watering, fertilizing at the right time, including the control of soil acidity and alkalinity. The fruit has just the right amount of sweetness and a crisp, oily texture [27][12].
In 2019, the price of volcanic durian in Sisaket province increased to 1200 Thai Baht per kilogram, which was a very high price. Although volcanic durian is highly rewarding for the agriculturists in Sisaket, due to the cost of irrigating and fertilizing, the energy costs for watering and fertilizing the durian orchards are also high, thus causing farmers in some years to suffer losses and labor shortages in providing water and fertilizer to the durian trees. These issues established the research team to realize the importance of energy management used in the durian orchard business for sustainability and solve the economic problems for the agriculturists in Kantharalak district, Sisaket province and become a ‘model of development’ that could be expanded to other durian orchards in Thailand [28][13].

References

  1. Haseeb, K.; Din, I.U.; Almogren, A.; Islam, N. An Energy Efficient and Secure IoT-Based WSN Framework: An Application to Smart Agriculture. Sensors 2020, 20, 2081.
  2. Zawadzki, S.J.; Vrieling, L.; van der Werff, E. What influences public acceptability of sustainable energy policies? The crucial role of funding and who benefits. Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 2021, 87, 102468.
  3. Steg, L.; Perlaviciute, G.; van der Werff, E. Understanding the human dimensions of a sustainable energy transition. Front. Psychol. 2015, 6, 805.
  4. Dong, X.; Klaiber, H.A. Consumer stockpiling in response to the U.S. EISA “light bulb ban”. Energy Econ. 2019, 81, 566–576.
  5. Liu, X.; Qi, N.; Dai, K.; Yin, Y.; Zhao, J.; Wang, X.; You, Z. Sponge Supercapacitor rule-based energy management strategy for wireless sensor nodes optimized by using dynamic programing algorithm. Energy 2022, 239, 122368.
  6. Shen, J.; Wang, A.; Wang, C.; Hung, P.C.; Lai, C.F. An efficient centroid-based routing protocol for energy management in WSN-assisted IoT. IEEE Access 2017, 5, 18469–18479.
  7. Zhang, Y.; Gao, H.; Cheng, S.; Li, J. An efficient EH-WSN energy management mechanism. Tsinghua Sci. Technol. 2018, 23, 406–418.
  8. Friha, O.; Ferrag, M.A.; Shu, L.; Maglaras, L.; Wang, X. Internet of Things for the Future of Smart Agriculture: A Comprehensive Survey of Emerging Technologies. IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sin. 2021, 8, 718–752.
  9. Hunter, M.C.; Smith, R.G.; Schipanski, M.E.; Atwood, L.W.; Mortensen, D.A. Agriculture in 2050: Recalibrating Targets for Sustainable Intensification. Bioscience 2017, 67, 386–391.
  10. Tao, W.; Zhao, L.; Wang, G.; Liang, R. Review of the internet of things communication technologies in smart agriculture and challenges. Comput. Electron. Agric. 2021, 189, 106352.
  11. Cheychom, K.; Sindhuphak, A.; Ratanaolarn, T. The Study Patterns and Problem Water Management for Agriculture of Durian Production in Chanthaburi, Thailand. Mediterr. J. Soc. Sci. 2019, 10, 53–62.
  12. Thongkaew, S.; Jatuporn, C.; Sukprasert, P.; Rueangrit, P.; Tongchure, S. Factors affecting the durian production of farmers in the eastern region of Thailand. Int. J. Agric. Ext. 2021, 9, 285–293.
  13. Escobar, J.J.M.; Matamoros, O.M.; Padilla, R.T.; Reyes, I.L.; Espinosa, H.Q. A Comprehensive Review on Smart Grids: Challenges and Opportunities. Sensors 2021, 21, 6978.
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