Technology transforming the agricultural business. Revisiting the fundamentals of "smart agriculture" enabled by advanced technologies like IoT.

IoT is being utilized across a wide range of fields, including home appliances, manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare. Its adoption is also advancing in agriculture, helping to solve challenges faced by Japanese farming. We will explain "smart agriculture," which utilizes advanced technologies like IoT, AI, and robotics, and consider the potential for agriculture and the surrounding business ecosystem.

IoT is the Key to Revitalizing Agriculture

IoT (Internet of Things) is the technology that connects all kinds of objects to the internet or networks. Connecting objects to the internet enables mechanisms for acquiring information from them or controlling them. In Japanese, it is generally translated as "Internet of Things."

When thinking of internet-connected devices, computers and smartphones likely come to mind first. However, connecting various other objects like home appliances, cars, buildings, and medical equipment to the internet is creating unprecedented services and value.

Benefits of Adopting IoT in Agriculture

IoT is also being utilized in various aspects of agriculture. Traditional farming has relied heavily on the experience, intuition, and long-cultivated techniques of skilled practitioners. However, by leveraging IoT to digitize and visualize the expertise of experienced farmers, even new entrants to farming can perform agricultural tasks at a high level. Furthermore, improved efficiency allows for managing larger farmlands. It also lowers barriers to entry for inexperienced young people and women concerned about physical strength, contributing to revitalizing agriculture. Now, let's look at examples of IoT applications in agriculture.

・Smartphone-based Water Management System
A system that uses sensors to monitor water levels in paddy fields, allowing farmers to remotely operate or automatically control water supply valves and drainage outlets via smartphones or other devices. This optimizes water management and reduces labor.

・Smart Fertilizer Application System Based on Growth Data
Sensors mounted on drones or agricultural machinery measure crop growth conditions. Based on this data, the system calculates and applies the optimal amount of fertilizer. This makes top-dressing easy for anyone to perform, while also improving yields and stabilizing quality.

・AI-powered automatic harvester
Machinery that uses AI to recognize crops ready for harvest and automatically harvest them. It autonomously navigates optimal routes and locates crops hidden by leaves or branches, reducing the labor required for harvesting and transport.

・Visualizing Expert Farmers' Techniques
Capture and digitize the advanced techniques of experienced farmers using smart glasses. AI analyzes this data and displays real-time, appropriate work instructions on smart glasses worn by new farmers. This visualization of techniques allows even inexperienced individuals to efficiently learn the key points of skilled farmers' work.

Solving Japan's Agricultural Challenges with Cutting-Edge Technologies like IoT, AI, and Robotics

The adoption of advanced technologies like IoT in agriculture stems from the underlying problems facing Japanese agriculture. The number of agricultural workers is decreasing year by year, aging is progressing, and the amount of abandoned farmland and fallow land is increasing. Despite this, many tasks still require manual labor and skilled techniques, making labor shortages a serious problem. Furthermore, increased imports of inexpensive, high-quality foreign agricultural products and environmental changes like climate change are contributing to a continuous decline in agricultural production. There are concerns that Japan may not be able to secure sufficient agricultural products domestically in the future.

What is "Smart Agriculture" promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries?

Advanced technologies, including IoT, hold the potential to solve these problems facing Japanese agriculture. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is promoting "Smart Agriculture," which utilizes cutting-edge technologies like IoT, AI, and robotics to reduce labor in farming and improve product quality. It is also advancing the "Smart Agriculture Demonstration Project," which introduces these technologies to farmers and verifies their effectiveness. By analyzing data collected via IoT, it is expected to enable strategic and efficient agriculture, such as increasing crop yields and predicting risks like abnormal weather.

For example, AI is being used in the fruit grading process to determine crop quality. For cucumbers, for instance, grading depends on factors like length, thickness, color, luster, texture, bumps or damage, and disease presence. This necessitates sorting based on these conditions before shipment. Traditionally, this sorting was done manually by skilled workers, making it labor-intensive. One farm achieved automated sorting by training AI on a vast database of photos of cucumbers prepared for each grade.

Naturally, this method of sorting crops varies by product type. Even for the same product, differences exist between regions and individual farms. Consequently, even if one farm develops specialized hardware, it may not be directly usable by others, potentially limiting its applicability. However, by improving software quality and enhancing the accuracy of vegetable recognition through training with large amounts of data, broader application becomes possible.

The Future of Agricultural Business Transformed by IoT

Following the 2009 agricultural land system reform, more non-agricultural corporations are entering the agricultural business. Food service and food-related companies are also engaging in agriculture to ensure stable raw material supply and traceability (the ability to track products from production to consumption). Furthermore, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is promoting "sixth industrialization," which integrates agriculture with manufacturing or retail to sell high-value-added branded products and increase profits. Examples include fruit growers manufacturing and selling premium fruit juices. It is also increasingly common for farmers to incorporate their operations, handling everything from crop production to product development and factory management. This corporate involvement and farmer incorporation means agriculture now demands higher profitability and greater value-added than ever before. Achieving this necessitates operational efficiency and data-driven farming strategies.

Responding to this trend, venture companies have emerged, providing agricultural solutions that leverage the latest plant science and cutting-edge technology. They are developing sensor technologies specialized for agriculture to support farmers, such as IoT sensors that constantly monitor environmental conditions in paddy fields and fields and crop growth status, sensors for managing paddy field water levels and temperatures, and cloud-based farming management systems that record farm work and share information.

Furthermore, the agricultural business encompasses not only crop production but also agricultural materials like machinery, pesticides, and fertilizers; plant breeding; and the distribution and processing of agricultural products. Data obtained through IoT is also being utilized in these areas. SMAGt (Smart Agriculture Gateway), a smart agriculture data distribution platform utilizing blockchain technology developed by Dentsu Inc. International Information Services, Inc., records the production history of regional agricultural products through to shipping, distribution, and sales, enhancing traceability. It enables communicating the safety of agricultural products and the dedication of producers to consumers, contributing to the branding of local agricultural products and preventing food fraud. It also facilitates efficient acquisition of data compliant with export regulations, aiding export expansion.

The Future of the Agricultural Business

As explained, corporate involvement is accelerating the smart transformation of agricultural business, contributing to solving challenges facing Japanese agriculture. It is expected that cutting-edge technologies will continue to be utilized in agriculture and related industries, driving business development.

With this future in mind, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) has also begun initiatives to utilize satellites for agricultural business. For example, it developed a program to estimate rice cultivation areas in Southeast Asian countries using satellites primarily intended for disaster and resource monitoring. This is also expected to aid in collecting agricultural statistical data. Furthermore, the "JASMIN" agricultural weather information system has been developed to assess rice crop conditions using data from "environmental monitoring satellites" designed to track climate change and water cycles. By providing broad-area, real-time weather monitoring, it aims to aid crop condition assessments. Leveraging such satellite data could eventually enable predictions of harvest fluctuations caused by climate change, potentially contributing to solving global challenges like alleviating food shortages.

The agricultural business faces various challenges, including an aging workforce, labor shortages, and climate change. Cutting-edge technologies, starting with IoT, can be the trump card to solve these issues. IoT will become indispensable for future agricultural businesses, enabling the production of high-value-added crops and enhancing profitability.

Furthermore, insights from the approach to smart agriculture may offer hints for revitalizing all industries. Beyond agriculture, understanding how to integrate IoT with industries, or how to improve and develop essential goods and services for human life—starting with "food"—as viable businesses. Learning about the evolution of smart agriculture provides suggestions for tackling these challenges.

Furthermore, when businesses strive for efficiency and productivity gains, they often tend to apply universal, generic methodologies. However, just as smart agriculture developed by solving concrete on-site concerns and aspirations—such as "harvesting more efficiently" or "stabilizing production volumes"—the key to finding truly necessary solutions may lie precisely in tackling each individual challenge encountered in the field.