Transforming Agriculture with LoRaWAN®: How AgriSens is Powering Productivity for Farmers

Pilot Things is a company that specializes in developing IoT solutions for a variety of industries, including agriculture. They support a variety of technologies and sensors so they can offer the best fit for their customers.

Pilot Things is revolutionizing the IoT software industry by making web applications compatible with sensor data. They provide amazing solutions with perfect integration between web technologies and core Pilot Things services.

Smallholder farmers worldwide face numerous challenges, such as reduced productivity, inefficiency, and the impacts of climate change. These issues significantly affect their food production and income.

Digital farming collects diverse data on weather, soil, water, atmospheric conditions, and animal health and location. The rise of varied sensing techniques makes it crucial to have a flexible IoT sensor ecosystem that can handle these distinct types of data.

Laying extensive field cables can be expensive and often unfeasible, especially when monitoring livestock. Various topographies and natural barriers necessitate wireless technology with broad coverage and deep penetration.

For every application type, there should be a quick, batch-like parameter configuration effortlessly distributed across the sensor network. The sensor outputs should also seamlessly feed into different cloud data visualization and analytics vendors.

To send control signals to on-field devices and machinery, we must enable full duplex, real-time communication. Despite increasing potential touchpoints for attackers, the cybersecurity strategy applied must adopt a security-first architecture that facilitates end-to-end implementation of global security standards.

Lastly, the virtual coordination of IoT devices should offer a simple workflow, including FUOTA operations, real-time alarm monitoring, and remote troubleshooting. These hurdles make it challenging to deploy digital farming solutions that operate efficiently and effectively for farmers.

Pilot Things, partnering with RAKwireless, has introduced a LoRaWAN®-powered AgriSens solution to tackle agricultural challenges. This solution includes sensors that track soil moisture, sunlight, humidity, wind, sun exposure, temperature, and pressure. These sensors link to a LoRaWAN® gateway, transmitting data to the cloud for analysis. Farmers can access this real-time data using their mobile devices and make informed decisions to enhance crop productivity.

LoRaWAN® technology is the key to addressing farming digitalization challenges, offering an efficient, flexible, and cost-effective solution for rural scenarios where cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks fall short. LoRaWAN® technology provides the optimal balance of price, performance, power consumption, and range.

The AgriSens software consists of two products, AgriSens Water and AgriSens Weather. AgriSens Water tracks soil moisture, sunlight, and humidity, enabling farmers to adjust irrigation in real-time. AgriSens Weather monitors wind, sun exposure, temperature, and pressure, providing farmers with accurate weather data. Both solutions come with threshold alarms and mobile notifications, and can be tailored to local needs, including language, regulations, and existing monitoring systems.

Furthermore, RAKwireless and Pilot Things have successfully integrated RAKwireless sensors and gateways with the AgriSens software, simplifying processes and maximizing benefits. The AgriSens solution helps farmers save time and money without sacrificing project needs or results. With a reasonable entry price per sensor, it offers one of the best cost-benefit ratios on the market.

Pilot Things chose the RAKWireless Sensor Hub product for its key advantages: cellular and LoRaWAN support for all deployment scenarios, compatibility with multiple external sensors for easy feature addition, and NFC support for straightforward onboarding.

To ensure scalability, the AgriSens solution leverages AWS's ability to connect billions of IoT devices and route trillions of messages to AWS services. It can adapt to the fluctuating economic nature of agriculture and adjust costs on-demand through AWS's robust security, scalability, AI integration, monitoring, and analytics capabilities.

The AgriSens solution, powered by LoRaWAN® technology, offers farmers a comprehensive tool for collecting and analyzing real-time data, adjusting irrigation promptly, monitoring weather conditions, and enhancing productivity while reducing costs.

AgriSens empowers farmers to boost productivity and tackle inherent challenges. By offering live data on weather and soil conditions, it enables farmers to modify irrigation practices and make well-informed crop decisions. This solution saves time and money and ensures no compromise on project requirements and outcomes. With an affordable initial cost per sensor, it offers one of the best cost-to-benefit ratios in the market. AgriSens is scalable and adjusts seamlessly to the economic dynamics of farming.

The LoRaWAN® technology ecosystem presents an effective, adaptable, and cost-efficient solution for rural scenarios where cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks fall short. It provides an optimal blend of price, performance, energy efficiency, and range, along with mandatory authentication, integrity and replay protection, and encryption. Inherently secure, the open LoRaWAN® standard employs three layers of AES-128 encryption.

Overall, AgriSens showcases the transformative power of digital innovation in agriculture and holds promise to enhance the lives of farmers globally.