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

农业是一项战略性经济活动，是帮助和保持加拿大新斯科舍省和全世界许多农村地区生存的基础。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的和对环境负责的。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）是一家开发物联网（IoT）解决方案的新斯科舍省公司，目前专注于建筑系统。在新斯科舍省社区学院（NSCC）的支持下，该公司现在正在寻求扩展到农业系统，帮助农民提高作物产量，利用智能传感器、农业无人机和自动驾驶拖拉机等新技术。因此，Hanatech正在开发一种“智能传感器”，它包括多种传感功能，如土壤温度、湿度和pH值，有待验证和优化，以用于商业用途。**拟议的应用研究项目将帮助Hanatech在其不断发展的业务中增加分销能力，从而获得有关其基于农业的物联网解决方案的可行性和生产力的宝贵见解。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对硬件提供商、软件提供商、网络/连接提供商以及最终服务提供商/集成商的市场机会产生重要影响，这反过来又将转化为这些不同子行业中特定工作的产生。结果也有可能成为加拿大公司推出的一项创新服务，适应加拿大的农业环境，而大多数现有解决方案都部署在温暖的气候中。这样的创新是提高加拿大农业生产力和经济增长的最快途径

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.**