IOT-BASED SMART FARMING: THE FUTURE WE MUST STRIVE FOR
Humankind has come a long way, and it was almost a ‘miracle’ that we managed to pull through potential extinction and become the dominant mammalian species on Planet Earth. Just before 12,000 years ago, for two million years, humans were still hunter-gatherers, living a nomadic lifestyle, hunting and fishing animals as well as foraging for wild vegetation for food. Prior to the emergence of the hunter-gatherer cultures, their predecessors scavenged on animal remains left behind by predators.
Beginning about 12,000 years ago during what is known as the Neolithic Revolution or the First Agricultural Revolution, humans started to relinquish the hunter-gatherer cultures for agriculture to support permanent settlement. The transition from the hunter-gathering practices to agriculture enable the populations to grow from less than 100 people to larger numbers.
The Second Agricultural Revolution was said to have been initiated in Britain, sparked by the rise of labor and productivity between the mid-17th century to late 19th century, leading to the increase of production. It involved the contemporary novel cultural practices including crop rotation to turnips and clover to supplant fallow. Turnips were picked as one of the options in the practice as they have the ability to survive winter and their deep root system allows them to collect minerals that are not accessible to shallow-rooted crops. The use of clover helps fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil making it sustainably fertile. This also provides perpetual production of fodder for livestock.
Other practices that engendered the Second Agricultural Revolution were the Dutch-improved Chinese plough that was pulled by fewer oxen or horses; development of transportation infrastructures, such as improved roads, canals and railways; land conversion, land drains and reclamation; increase in farm size; selective breeding, etc. That was also an epochal period in which the genesis of the First Industrial Revolution took place between mid-18th century to mid-19th century. The aforementioned increase of production including that of agriculture was
