Smart Agriculture and Precision Farming Powered by the IoT: Technological Challenges and Opportunities for Hanatech Inc.

农业是一项战略经济活动，是帮助和维持新斯科舍省、加拿大和世界各地许多农村地区生存的根本。为了支持其人口的经济和社会福利，今天的农业应该是生产性和对环境负责的。这需要技术创新，以最大限度地提高活动效率，同时确保食品生产提供高质量和合理价格的结果，符合可持续的环境标准。在此背景下，Hanatech Inc.(Hanatech)是新斯科舍省的一家公司，开发物联网(IoT)解决方案，目前专注于建设系统。在新斯科舍社区学院(NSCC)的支持下，该公司目前正寻求扩展到农业系统，利用智能传感器、农业无人机和自动驾驶拖拉机等新技术，帮助农民提高作物产量。因此，Hanatech正在开发一种“智能传感器”，它包括多种传感功能，即土壤温度、湿度和pH，以供商业使用进行验证和优化。**拟议的应用研究项目将帮助Hanatech在为其不断发展的业务扩大分销能力的过程中，对其基于农业的物联网解决方案的可行性和生产率获得有价值的见解。从供应方的角度来看，未来采用拟议的基于物联网的解决方案将在硬件提供商、软件提供商、网络/连接提供商和最终服务提供商/集成商的市场机会方面产生重要影响，这反过来将转化为这些不同细分行业创造特定就业机会。这一成果还有可能成为一家加拿大公司推出的创新服务，适应加拿大的农业环境，而现有的大多数解决方案都部署在更温暖的气候中。这样的创新是提高加拿大农业部门生产率和经济增长的最快方式。**

Agriculture is a strategic economic activity and is fundamental to help and keep many rural areas alive in Nova Scotia, Canada and worldwide. In order to support the economic and social welfare of their population, today's agriculture should be productive and environmentally responsible. This requires technological innovation to maximize the efficiency of the activity while ensuring that food production delivers a good quality and reasonably priced result, complying with sustainable environmental criteria. In this context, Hanatech Inc. (Hanatech) is a Nova Scotia company developing Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, with a current focus on building systems. With the support of Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC), the company is now looking to expand into agricultural systems, helping farmers be more productive in their crop yields, utilizing new technologies such as smart sensors, farming drones, and self-drive tractors. Hanatech is therefore developing a "Smart Sensor", which includes multiple sensing functions, i.e. soil temperature, moisture, and pH, to be validated and optimized for commercial use.**The proposed applied research project will help Hanatech gain valuable insights into feasibility and productivity of their agriculture-based IoT solution as they grow their distributing capacity for their evolving business. On a supply side perspective, the future adoption of the proposed IoT-based solutions will have an important impact in terms of market opportunity for hardware providers, software providers, network/connectivity providers, and final service providers/integrators, which in turn, will translate into the generation of specific jobs in those different subsectors. The outcome also has potential to be an innovative service launched by a Canadian company, adapted to Canadian farming environment, while most of the existing solutions are deployed in warmer climates. Such an innovation represents the fastest way to boost productivity and economic growth in the Canadian agricultural sector.**