Guest Lecture on IoT in Agriculture
A guest lecture on “Internet of Things in Agriculture” was held at Symbiosis Institute of International Business on the 20th of July, 2019. The session was conducted for the students pursuing their MBA in Agri-Business, Batch 2018-2020 as well as Batch 2019-2021. The keynote speaker for the same was Mr. Amit Kumar Yadav, an SIIB alumni of Batch 2007-2009. He is currently working as the Head of Market Development and Innovations – Asia Pacific at Omya Agriculture and Forestry. The lecture started off with a brief introduction to “Smart Farming”, innovation, sustainability and digital transformation of agriculture in the world as well as in India. Mr. Yadav discussed about the concept of “Farming 4.0 – The future lies in Smart Farming” and also educated the students on the importance of the need to implement smart agriculture in the Indian context. Some of the key application areas that he discussed were Smart Monitoring, Smart Control and Smart Planning along with warehousing, logistics and distribution. He also discussed other new fields such as aquaculture, forestry and horticulture. Mr. Amit Yadav also talked to the students about various IT giants that are foraging into the field of IoT of agriculture such as Google and IBM. The students shared their knowledge about the upcoming technologies such as fertigation and smart soil testing techniques with the alumnus. Mr. Yadav also talked about some of the other key challenges persisting in the Indian agriculture sector and how we, as future Agri-Business managers can work to find solutions for them. The lecture ended with a discussion and a question-answer session with an emphasis on the huge scope of integrating different systems in agriculture.
