Implementing sustainable Internet of Things in horticulture

Abstract

The Dutch agricultural sector needed to increase its production over the years. Production increased as a result of new technologies, growing amounts of pesticides, and government policies. Although these changes were fruitful, it is currently provoking environmental concerns. This is causing pressure for farmers to be more sustainable in the last few years. Therefore, farmers are embracing technology to produce more efficiently and sustainably. To increase sustainability, farmers need other organizations who help them with achieving more sustainable production. To make the biggest sustainable impact, all stakeholders of the supply chain need to collaborate to make the sector more sustainable. Therefore, it’s needed to create an ecosystem for continual innovation, to eventually be a more sustainable sector. IoT can be applied to automate the horticultural processes, which leads to reduced usage of resources, such as water, electricity, and pesticides, to increase the sustainability potential. Monitoring Service is developed to automatically fulfill the need of the crops. To be able to develop this solution, an ecosystem is needed to realize the Monitoring Service. The most important partner is a current horticultural technology supplier. This partnership has the benefits to easily enter the horticultural market, create more market knowledge, and makes it easy to contact the first prospects. Within the ecosystem, KPN provides the connectivity to connect all technologies with the platform. Besides the connectivity, KPN also sells its service as data safe. This data safe is a service that guaranteed the safety of the data, which keeps the data collected within the ecosystem.