Agricultural sector

IoT in agriculture replaces inspection trips with measured data. Sensors capture soil moisture, water levels, temperatures and machine condition, and wireless networks deliver the data to your smartphone, your office or straight into the control system. This data-driven way of working is called smart farming.

Here you will find real-world examples from the agricultural sector, implemented by users and providers from the IoT Use Case network. They range from a watering trolley that saves up to 60% water to remote maintenance of barn technology and secure digital identities for CLAAS agricultural machinery. Each example shows which technology is used and what it has achieved. No vision of the future, just projects that have actually been implemented.

What is smart farming?

Smart farming is data-driven agriculture. Connected sensors capture what is happening in the field, in the barn or on the machine, and software turns this into alerts, control commands and a basis for decisions. The technical foundation is the Internet of Things (IoT). The terms agriculture 4.0 and digital farming are often used to mean the same thing.

Typical fields of application are irrigation, barn and farm machinery, a farm's water and energy supply, and documentation. Precision farming, also known as precision agriculture, is a subset of smart farming. Fertiliser, crop protection and water are applied according to the needs of each part of a field, usually GPS-guided and based on satellite or drone data. IoT in agriculture goes further and covers everything that can be measured and monitored remotely.

The big advantage of the digitalisation of agriculture is that its benefits can often be measured directly. They show up in cubic metres of water, inspection trips saved and hours of downtime avoided. The following examples from the IoT Use Case network show this with real figures.

Smart farming examples: IoT applications in agriculture today

Irrigation: up to 60% less water

The precision watering trolley from Dercks Gartenbau places water exactly in the centre of each pot and saves up to 60% water as a result. Per hectare and season, that amounts to up to 4,000 cubic metres of water and 1,400 kilograms of nutrient salts. Energy chains from igus guide the supply lines along the long travel paths, while sensors continuously monitor the forces acting on the cables.

A district in Germany has digitised agricultural irrigation. Battery-powered data loggers from PSsystec read the water meters in the field chambers via NB-IoT and LTE-M. The volumes are compared with the planned time windows, for example 8 to 10 p.m. This reduces evaporation, makes on-site checks unnecessary and documents every irrigation run automatically, including for processing subsidies.

Monitoring wells and heat pipelines via the mobile network

At Kögelhof in Mochenwangen, a farm with a biogas plant, an IO-Link level sensor measures the water level of the well, which is a few hundred metres from the farm. The io-key mobile gateway from ifm sends the readings to the IIoT platform moneo, without any cables or network on site. Power comes from a small solar module with a battery. If the level falls below the limit, a notification is sent automatically.

The same farm supplies heat from its biogas plant to the local school via a 1.5-kilometre pipeline. Temperature sensors on the flow and return lines monitor the district heating pipeline, and a mobile gateway reports when too little heat reaches the school.

Remote maintenance of barn and farm technology

Rudolf Hörmann builds barn, hall and control systems for agricultural businesses. For remote access to its control systems, the company now relies on the IXON cloud platform instead of its own VPN servers. A new router can be set up with a USB stick in five minutes instead of around 30 minutes. Many service cases can now be solved remotely, for example when a manure scraper stops because a motor protection switch has tripped. In the past, that often meant hours on the road.

Where downtime is expensive, condition monitoring is also worthwhile: sensors record forces, temperatures or vibrations and report wear before a system comes to a standstill. On the Dercks Gartenbau watering trolley, the sensors can even trigger an emergency stop if a limit value is exceeded.

Traceability and the digital product passport

Bayer CropScience has been labelling crop protection products and seeds with security labels and QR codes from KURZ Digital for around ten years. A scan shows whether a product is genuine. More than one billion codes are now in the system. The same technology is the basis for the digital product passport, which the EU will gradually make mandatory for many product groups from 2027. Learn more about traceability.

Secure digital identities for agricultural machinery

Modern agricultural machines send telemetry, GPS and harvest data to the backend and receive software updates over the air. For this purpose, CLAAS and secunet have built a public key infrastructure (PKI) for connected agricultural machinery. Each machine receives its own certificate during production, linked to its serial number. This ensures that only authorised machines communicate with the backend and with platforms such as CLAAS connect. Both companies explain how they went about it in the podcast episode Digital agriculture with secure identities.

Wind energy on farmland: bird protection during field work

Where wind turbines stand on agricultural land, under certain conditions they must shut down during the day while fields are being mown, harvested or tilled, and for a while afterwards. This work attracts bird species such as the red kite. The SELA system from ATEG Automation detects field work with infrared cameras within a radius of up to 250 metres. Via an IIoT gateway from Red Lion, it automatically switches the turbine into a bird-safe idling mode. This makes the error-prone coordination between farmer and turbine operator unnecessary.

Aquaculture: fish farming in a container

The Austrian start-up Blue Planet Ecosystems breeds fish in a closed ecosystem the size of a container, powered by sunlight. Sensors measure temperature, light and oxygen levels, while cameras with artificial intelligence observe the fish. Via MQTT and the Cloudflight cloud platform, the system is monitored, controlled and continuously optimised remotely.

The technology behind smart farming: sensors, connectivity and platform

An IoT solution in agriculture usually consists of three parts. Sensors measure what matters: soil moisture, level, flow, temperature, forces or machine condition. Industrial sensors are often connected via IO-Link, water meters with a pulse output via simple data loggers.

Data transmission has to suit the location. Fields and meter chambers rarely have power or Wi-Fi. That is why many projects rely on low-power wireless: NB-IoT and LTE-M use the mobile network, while LoRaWAN bridges several kilometres with its own gateways. Battery-powered devices can often run for years without a battery change, the data logger in the district project for up to five years.

Finally, the IoT platform collects the data, displays it in dashboards and sends alerts by SMS, email or app. Interfaces such as a REST API pass the data on to existing systems. Data security is part of it from the start: encrypted connections, separate networks and unique device identities, as in the CLAAS example.

Field, not factory: what makes IoT in agriculture different

Conditions in the field are different from those in a factory: dust, moisture, frost and heat, dead spots in rural areas and measuring points without a power supply. That is why robust, waterproof devices are needed, powered by batteries or solar modules, along with wireless technology that uses little energy. Solutions that pre-process data on site keep working even when the connection is weak.

Then there is the size of the business. Many farms do not have their own IT department. Solutions need to be easy to commission without programming skills, require little maintenance and be able to start with a single measuring point. Dercks Gartenbau installed the energy chain and monitoring itself. For the well at Kögelhof, a level sensor, a mobile gateway and a small solar module were enough.

Five steps to your own smart farming project

1. Start with a measurable problem. Choose a use case whose benefit you can express in euros, cubic metres or hours: water consumption, inspection trips, downtime or documentation effort.

2. Retrofit existing equipment. Meters with a pulse output, existing controls and sensors can usually be connected by retrofitting, without rebuilding the system.

3. Choose the wireless technology to suit the site. Check mobile coverage, clarify the power supply, then decide between NB-IoT, LTE-M, LoRaWAN or 4G.

4. Start small, then roll out. A pilot with a few measuring points shows after one season whether the solution pays off. At Dercks Gartenbau, the calculation was confirmed after the very first season.

5. Make the data usable. Alerts, dashboards and interfaces determine whether the data is used in everyday work and whether it can be reused for subsidy applications and ESG reports.