Z Farms was facing three challenges: costly irrigation systems with water as a limited resource, narrow optimal ranges of soil moisture for growth with difficult maintenance and farm operators could not simply turn on irrigation systems like a faucet.

Farming Orchids is the most successful form of precision farming in Taiwan, and also the most exported flower. Orchids need a specific temperature and humidity conditions to grow and bloom, and its flowering time may not be in line with market demands, so the price collapses when there is overproduction. Therefore, some farmers began to import automated greenhouse control systems for breeding and forcing, which not only improves quality, but also effectively controls the production period and yield to ensure revenue. In 2012, an orchid farmer built a Forcing Greenhouse of about 200 pings (approximately 661 Square Meters) in Tainan, Taiwan. The system integrator adopted Advantech’s APAX-5000 series programmable automation controllers to build the control platform, coupled with Advantech WebAccess HMI/SCADA software, to achieve cloud monitoring. The staff of the orchid field can monitor important data anytime via smart phone, iPad, and other handheld devices, and control the growth and flowering conditions. System requirements: In the past, most environmental control systems of orchid greenhouses in Taiwan used PLCs (Programmable Logic Controller) with poorscalability and control, and could not be connected to the Internet formonitoring from the cloud. For advanced database analysis and networking capability, the PC platform must be adopted. Therefore, PAC Systems (Programmable Automation Controller) with both PLC programming capabilities andPC functions is a better choice.The environmental control of the Orchid greenhouse switches on and off devices like fan, shade net, cooling/heat pump, liquid flow control, water-cooling wall etc. It is controlled by a control panel of electric controllers, and is driven by a motor, to adjust the greenhouse temperature, humidity, and other environmental conditions to the set parameters.

DigiBale, wanted to apply technology know-how and IP from implementations successfully to more agriculture sectors including cotton, forestry, sugarcane and cattle. However, farmers and growers still have worries about the connected technology.

Honeybees are insects of large economic value and provide a vital service to agriculture by pollinating a variety of crops. In addition, bees provide us with valuable products such as honey, beeswax, propolis, bee venom, etc. Monitoring of honeybee colony health, population, productivity, and environmental conditions affecting the colony health have always been exceedingly difficult tasks in apiculture. Research has shown that even small deviations (by more than 2°C) from the optimal temperatures have a significant influence on the development of the brood and the health of adult bees.

The quality of asparagus depends heavily on the temperature of the ground in which it’s grown. To control the temperature, farmers use a two-sided sheet of foil: the black side draws in sunlight to increase the heat of the asparagus bed, and the white side reflects light to cool the bed down. In order to make the right “black or white” decision, the farmer needs to measure the temperature of every field at least once each evening.

For people who live and work in big cities, growing their own fruits and vegetables is a dream which is often difficult to realize. But how about renting a greenhouse, and being able to remotely plant seeds, spray water and apply fertilizers through a webpage, and then watching how your crops are growing via streaming video from an IP camera while you occasionally pay a physical visit to your plants at the weekends or holidays to harvest and cook your vegetables at a feast? A group of young Taiwanese entrepreneurs are making their own, and other people’s dreams come true by establishing greenhouse plots for rent. Leveraging the latest Advantech technologies and features provided by the ADAM-6200 series Ethernet I/O series and WebAccess 8.0 HMI/SCADA software, they’ve created a greenhouse automation and remote monitoring solution from which their customers can control and monitor the environment via a virtual dashboard on a computer, smartphone or other web-based device in real time.

Semios has been offering pest management systems using a network of connected devices including pheromone dispensers, automated traps, soil moisture meters, leaf-wetness monitoring and weather stations. Pheromones are an alternative for pesticides. The challenge was that pheromones are generally more expensive than pesticides. To get the growers to adopt pheromones Semios need to automate their delivery in a way that's going to be more cost-effective. The two key elements of precision agriculture are the provision of information based on data collected from the field and, based on that information, timely, precise action to manage the crop. Semios wanted an IoT solution to better manage the data and control the logistic of pheromone.

The global population is continuing to grow at a rapid pace placing increasing demands on the global food supply. In addition, impacts from climate change and a yearly reduction of available arable land will require the Agricultural sector to develop better ways of increasing crop yields and reducing costs. GOAL The goal for the Precision Crop Management Testbed is to create an environment where IoT solutions with the potential to impact world hunger can be developed.

Freight Farms’ goal was to create a connected farming environment that was simple to set-up, highly responsive, easy to scale, and would offer a path to future features and services - from day-to-day operations, to support, to growing optimizations, connecting their farms delivers an even greater experience to their farmers. After internal constraints for the hours of support required to build, integrate and maintain their own IoT solution, Freight Farms began looking at and evaluating IoT partners they could trust.

Traditionally, farmers either apply a high dosage or a high number of repeat sprayings of chemicals as they do not want to risk any disease or damage to the crops on which their livelihoods depend. This is quite inefficient in terms of both time and money wasted. Dacom aimed to increase the effectiveness of these farmers by providing them with accurate, real-time, and streamlined information.