Custom-tailored Smart Farming solutions with Kaa
For farmers and growers, IoT technology has already proven itself as a great way to increase yield and reduce operational costs through automation. This technology is also considered to be a cornerstone of smart farming, which is a data-driven and highly automated approach to cultivating soil and raising livestock. By using a broad range of IoT-enabled devices - such as soil moisture sensors, remote controlled sprinklers, or RFID ear tags - those in the farming business can achieve more by doing less.
However, getting started with smart farming transformation still requires some strategic planning. There are two basic strategies - using a prebuilt smart farming solution from a vendor or taking a feature-rich IoT platform and creating a custom-tailored solution for all your specific needs. Obviously, each has its pros and cons. The following is how we combined these two approaches into one with Kaa.
Kaa advantages for smart farming
As a feature-rich IoT toolbox, Kaa is a versatile IoT platform that can be used to create a broad variety of IoT applications, including for smart farming. However, despite its inherent technological complexity, we made it our first priority to offer users a simple graphical interface for working with the platform. In most cases, creating a smart farming dashboard in Kaa will be about selecting proper data visualization widgets and filling out the corresponding widget settings. There’s no need for coding or having previous IoT development experience to use the platform.
Once you get the hang of it, there’s no way you could tolerate some hard-wired smart farming solutions that cannot be easily modified whenever you need to update your use case. The flexibility provided by Kaa makes it perfectly applicable for single-purpose smart farming products — such as smart metering devices, livestock trackers, or failure prediction systems — as well as for multi-device solutions, among which are asset tracking and farming produce analytics solutions. You can connect any devices that support IoT, scale your solution as you grow, and take advantage of such great features as IoT analytics, over-the-air updates, and smart alerts, which come standard in Kaa.
To address the needs of enterprise-level customers, Kaa also offers advanced user management, security, and multitenancy support. You can create a hierarchy of user roles and permissions to match your business processes. You can even let people outside the company, such as customers or contractors, access the system to view some specific information.
Finally, for a quick start with IoT solution development in Kaa, we have introduced a ground-breaking templates feature. These templates are nothing else but ready-to-go solution dashboards that we create and add to the platform so that our clients can freely use them as the foundation for their projects. The smart farming template is on our list as well and it’s coming soon! Before we roll it out, you can actually influence what features go in there by getting in touch with us.