Sep 24, 2025
Feeding 9 Billion: The Rise of Digital Agriculture
With the global population projected to add an extra billion people by 2040, the demand for food is expected to increase by 50–70%. This surge is driven by population growth, rising incomes, shifting dietary preferences, and higher per capita food consumption. Meeting this demand requires innovative solutions in agriculture.
Historically, global food supply has kept pace with demand. Between 1961 and 2020, agricultural output increased nearly fourfold, boosting daily caloric supply across every continent. Technological innovation has been central to this progress. Since the 1980s, the evolution of smart farming and precision agriculture through advances in electronics, computing, and data science has transformed the industry, ushering in the era of Agriculture 4.0 and resulting in a boost to production and more sustainable practices.
The Impact of IoT, AI, and Big Data in Agriculture
The integration of IoT (Internet of Things), artificial intelligence (AI), and big data analytics is revolutionising modern agriculture. These technologies enable real-time monitoring and precision farming, while also addressing the need for data-driven decision-making, and enhancing productivity and sustainability. IoT-based agricultural systems have demonstrated the ability to:
· Increase crop yields by up to 25%
· Reduce irrigation water consumption by 50%
· Lower post-harvest losses by 30%
From remote herd monitoring to automated farm machinery, these advancements are critical and timely as modern agriculture faces numerous interconnected challenges such as climate change, water scarcity, and soil degradation, all of which threaten global food security.
Smart Agricultural Policy: Ensuring Food Security
At both national and continental levels, sustainable and future-ready food security strategies are gaining momentum. Large-scale government-backed initiatives like India’s Digital Agricultural Mission and China’s 2024–2028 Smart Agricultural Action Plan position IoT as a key enabler for digital agriculture ecosystems and farmer-centric solutions.
Soil health and the prevention of continued degradation of fertile topsoil is a major focus in such initiatives. India’s mission to digitally map 142 million hectares of farmland and the European Union’s aspirational new framework for soil monitoring (as part of its 2050 healthy soil goals) will both rely on widespread IoT adoption, particularly soil monitoring sensors, to achieve their objectives.
Overcoming Challenges: Accessibility and Empowerment
The capital-intensive nature of IoT projects, coupled with at times low levels of digital literacy amongst agricultural workers, can limit the adoption to larger, commercially managed farms, and favour industrialised nations which benefit from better connectivity and digital infrastructure.
With the Global South now producing over 70% of the world’s agricultural output, addressing this imbalance is crucial. Of the 608 million farms worldwide, many are small (less than 2 hectares) yet collectively contribute a third of global food production. Regional and private initiatives are working to provide subsidies and support frameworks to facilitate update and lower the adoption barriers for digital technologies and IoT in agriculture.
Connectivity: The Backbone of Smart Agriculture
Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies including LoRaWAN and NB-IoT are the complimentary cornerstone technologies of IoT sensing, with the blends of long-range, low power consumption, and scalability rendering them ideally suited for agricultural IoT deployments.
In Africa, IoT is steadily gaining traction in precision agriculture, delivering yield improvements and better disease prevention. But the adoption path is long, and dependent on infrastructure improvements. Legacy 2G and 3G networks are inadequate for modern IoT applications and must be phased out in favour spectrum re-allocation for data centric IoT applications. Limited carrier coverage and SIM card management challenges also need to be addressed.
Emerging solutions like 5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) and Satellite NB-IoT, enabled by Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, offer a significant leap to bridge the connectivity gap in remote and underserved regions, bringing smart agriculture to new frontiers.
Sustainability: Energy Harvesting Technology for Sustainable IoT
As traction continues to develop with energy harvesting techniques in the drive towards sustainable and battery-less IoT, emerging technologies such as soil microbial fuel cells (SMFC), offer the potential of low-cost, sustainable power sources for large-scale IoT application deployments, such as agricultural IoT soil-sensors.
Traditional renewable energy methods, in particular solar power, should also continue to gain traction - particularly in major food-producing nations in the Global South. As these countries pivot towards renewable energy sources, sustainable IoT will play a pivotal role in the cleantech revolution.
Conclusion: Agriculture 5.0 and the Future of Food Security
With the dawning of the Agriculture 5.0 era, IoT, AI, and big data will unlock new levels of personalisation of agriculture, and sustainable and precision ecosystem practices in farming. Coupled with the global shift from legacy networks, and advances with satellite connectivity options, it is clear that IoT will be the foundation of agricultural digital systems, enabling even the most remote regions with digital agriculture and ensuring food security.