Precision Agriculture for Medicinal Plants: A Conjunction of Technologies

Recent advancements in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology have paved the emergence of new-age agricultural practices. Deep learning, one of the subsets of AI has shown remarkable results in cases of crop classification, disease detection and pest identifications whereas blockchain technology has enabled the creation of trusted supply chains and maintains a balance between the demand and supply of agricultural products. The two new age technologies when combined with the existing infrastructure of IoT and Cloud computing create a formidable alliance for precision agriculture. In this work of ours, we propose a conjunction of all four technologies as one single solution for the cultivation of medicinal plants. The industry for medicinal plants still hasn’t seen the impact of Agriculture 4.0 and is most dependent on traditional practices. Bringing along the practices of precision agriculture supported by ICT technologies has the potential to solve problems pertaining to environmental conditions, accessibility to the global markets, plant growth monitoring, non-uniformity of ingredients, and pre and post-harvest data processing.