IoT in Agriculture—APAC Telco Growth Opportunities, 2019

The APAC Agriculture IoT market stood at $0.12 billion in 2018 and is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 27.4Percentage between 2018 to 2025 to reach $0.65 billion by 2025. The study has calculated the spending across key application areas comprising crop surveying and condition monitoring, smart irrigation systems, precision planting, proximity marketing, precision fertilizer application, condition and health monitoring, water quality monitoring, automated feed dispensing, navigational services, autonomous machinery, ecological monitoring, and smart logging. The market is expected to expand rapidly as farmers, particularly in more developed regions, turn to IoT solutions to improve yield and cope with crippling labor shortages. In particular, 4 main mega trends are expected to drive demand in this space: 1. Increasing Demand for Food: Global population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. In order to produce enough food for the entire population, farmers must boost food production by 25Percentage-70Percentage by 2050. 2. Drive to Reduce Wastage: There is a high degree of wastage in the application of agricultural inputs. For example, less than 50Percentage of fertilizers used are absorbed by the soil or plants. The rest usually contaminates ground water – resulting in wastage and pollution. 3. Growing Scarcity of Inputs: The production of biofuels has grown from 60 billion liters in 2007 to 130 billion liters in 2015 - this has resulted in more and more cereals and oilseed being used for biofuel production instead of farming. Freshwater availability is also becoming problematic due to increased urbanization. 4. Effects of Climate Change: The University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment found that climate change reduced global rice and wheat yields every year by 0.3Percentage and 0.9Percentage respectively. In addition, the United Nations panel on climate change warns that agricultural activities contribute to a third of greenhouse gas emissions. In the short term, we predict that IoT solutions that help to survey and monitor crops and livestock (e.g. animal health sensors) will see the highest adoption rates, particularly by large corporate farms. We anticipate that automation solutions (e.g. drones and agribots) for other laborious tasks like spraying and seeding will experience increased adoption in the short-to-medium term as regulations catch up with the rapidly-maturing technology. As agricultural sites transform into more data-rich environments, we predict that suppliers’ (equipment and input) business models will also evolve to incorporate additional value-added services based on the data and usage of data to shape their pricing strategy. Author: Deepu Nair