IEEE OFCCT 2023: Keynote 2.4: Climate-Smart Agriculture for Food Security

As reported in the report recently issued by the United Nations (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC Report 2021), the benefits that technology provides to a green and sustainable economy are highly appreciated and under intense research and development globally. Actual technologies, applied in the domain of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), can bring the needed functionalities and performances for reaching eco-friendly, circular and practical solutions, having as one of the main targets the Food Security. By CSA is possible to obtain more controlled quality production, water use optimisation, and a lower spreading of pesticides and fertilisers, serving the improvement of food quality, but also helping the respect of agriculture for the environment. For reaching these targets, electronics are the perfect tool for interfacing the data sources, extracting the data and processing them, and obtaining the needed information along the whole food chain: from the farmer, and the professional stakeholders to the consumers.
In the keynote talk, an overview of electronics for precision agriculture will be presented, analysing the possible solutions that can bring important innovations, advancing the actual strategies based on remote or indirect measurements, by instead in-place measuring the plant and soil parameters (a.k.a. Let the Plants do the Talking), associated with more standard information derived from environmental conditions. Application scenarios for crop monitoring, water control, information communication and decision support will be presented. In particular, will be analysed technologies for reaching the needed levels of low power and low cost, and the efficient ones to be applied to AgriFood at the global scale, supporting Food Security and Sustainability.