IoT Farming Solution: GPS Tracking for Agriculture Management

Problem

A farming company’s application provides an IoT-based agriculture monitoring system that ensures full control over crops, higher profitability, and compliance with food safety standards. So far, the product operates on the national market, but its owners get ready for a global release. 

The company needs to connect its IoT-based farming app to a GPS tracking platform to process data from devices installed on tractors and agricultural machinery. However, it was a not-so-trivial problem:

• Tractors and other pieces of equipment in agriculture usually move at a speed as low as one to four kilometers per hour. Most trackers ignore such values and don't send them any further, so a farmer doesn’t have a clear picture of what’s happening in the field.
• The solution must provide a reliable connection with the GPS tracking platform for data transfer and processing.
• As the application is developed as a product for a global market, its owners were searching for devices and ways to transfer data from them that would be available worldwide.

Finding the right hardware for the IoT farming product was a challenge, and the company spent six months checking the leading manufacturers of trackers with no results.

Solution

·       Hardware

The telematics service provider started with a search for the most suitable devices capable of tracking low-speed machinery. They needed a solution that would combine accuracy and fine granular tracking for effective IoT-based farming. Some of the hardware manufacturers they were considering were even ready to make changes to their basic models; in this case, unfortunately, they would lack data precision.

The GPS Tracking Solutions tracks low speeds with high accuracy and has a complete set of additional functions that can be customized. Also, it has an input that tu s it into a vehicle tracker with no effort.

After integrating trackers into the IoT farming solution, there is a need to create a converter to tu one voltage into another and unify it for different models of trackers.

·       Software

After testing several GPS tracking platforms, it can collect data from trackers. The API is secure and reliable to connect services and transfer datasets of all sorts and numbers.

The IoT farming solution allows its users to:

• Check working instruction execution;
• Ensure automatic logging of daily operations in the field and optimize them;
• Track employees, subcontractors, and machinery during working hours;
• Find mistakes in ongoing processes and correct them online;
• Reduce costs of implementation activities.

o   The farming GPS system works with global SIM cards that are used worldwide. 

o   After implementing the solution, the company continues to provide 24/7 phone/mail support.