With the ever increasing population, there is greater constant pressure on land, water and other natural resources. The current population of our world being 8 billion, is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, optimized crop production is crucial to feed our growing population. Farming being a labour intensive sector has slowly transformed into a technology intensive sector in the last decade, particularly with introduction of precision agriculture, smart farming and other digital technologies. Digital twin in agriculture is one such promising advancement in this field.
'Digital twin' refers to the digital representation of a physical model that can predict future based on real and historical data.
They are dynamic representation of real world objects through various stages of their life cycle. They can be used to monitor the 'real world thing' remotely. Being virtual replicas, these digital twins can be used to predict and understand the behavior of real life asset. Digital twins are monitored using devices such as laptops, tablets or even mobile phones, the prediction of future and accessing history is made much easier, enabling the farmer to take much informed management decisions.
For example:
Digital twin of a cow could alert the farmer of a certain illness or poor health without the farmer having to examine the animal. Similar goes for crop production as well.
Farmers can utilize Digital twins to simulate their farming method with virtual setting, and refine their practices before applying them in reality.
Advantages associated with Digital twin:
- Prevent loss of time and resources: Agriculturalists have no way of experimenting with plants except by trial and error method, leading to abundant loss of time and resources, digital twin can give detailed understandings of plant and animal behavior to improve farm efficiency.
- Enable short term responsive action and long term planning
-Can provide transparency to end consumer, fetching higher premium for the farmer.
- Remote monitoring of farm machineries
- Improve sustainabilty: By creating a DT, farmers can have a better understanding of how their farming practices affect environment and take measures to reduce the same.
-Enhance resource utilization and efficiency: The dynamic model of the farm created using data can be used to test different scenarios and optimize various farming operations thereby enabling more efficient resource utilization, improved crop yield and overall efficiency.
Promising prospects for DT's:
Livestock management, Protected cultivation (Growing under controlled environmental conditions), dairy production, plant disease and pest analysis, farm machinery management, organic vegetable farming and food chain supply optimization.
Conclusion
Digital twins are promising technology in agriculture however, they are likely to be expensive in many cases, moreover it is feared that the farmers or other decision makers will be separated emotionally and physically from real world system. Data privacy and ethical concerns also need to be addressed and there is a great need for further research in this sector as current research is very limited.
Nonetheless, the adoption of Digital twins in agriculture is sure to have massive scope of success providing the benefits and potential it provides for the betterment of farmers and society as a whole.
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