A Survey on Intelligent Agricultural Information Handling Methodologies

The term intelligent agriculture , or smart farming , typically involves the incorporation of computer science and information technologies into the traditional notion of farming. The latter utilizes plain machinery and equipment used for many decades and the only significant improvement made over the years has been the introduction of automation in the process. Still, at the beginning of the new century, there are ways and room for further vast improvements. More specifically, the low cost of rather advanced sensors and small-scale devices, now even connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), allowed them to be introduced in the process and used within agricultural production systems. New and emerging technologies and methodologies, like the utilization of cheap network storage, are expected to advance this development. In this sense, the main goals of this paper may be summarized as follows: (a) To identify, group, and acknowledge the current state-of-the-art research knowledge about intelligent agriculture approaches, (b) to categorize them according to meaningful data sources categories, and (c) to describe current efficient data processing and utilization aspects from the perspective of the main trends in the field.