Intelligent and Flood Resilient Agriculture

Crop production is an important task for ensuring food security. Hence, it is important to ensure a high global food production. However, flooding impairs crop production to achieve food security. The occurrence of large scale flooding causes the loss of a significant number of crops. This challenge arises due to the reliance of agriculture on terrestrial land resources. A solution that reduces the reliance of agriculture on terrestrial resources is proposed and presented. The proposed solution incorporates the multi-location plant paradigm alongside logical plant units (LPUs). LPUs can change their locations and return to the initial terrestrial position after the receding of a flood event. This enables crop production of food in areas with high flooding susceptibility. Previously, crop production in such areas was deemed infeasible. An LPU can be hosted in aerial, ocean-surface or terrestrial environment. The proposed solution reduces the number of lost crops by an average of (9.6-33) % in a two-farm scenario. The results of analysis shows that the use of LPUs incorporating dynamic location plants can limit crop loss due to flooding.

1. Introduction

Agricultural aims to produce food with the goal of achieving food security. This is done by enhancing crop yield [1, 2, 3] and monitoring crop health [4, 5, 6]. Agriculture should ensure food security while ensuring land is accessible for meeting housing needs. Farmers should also have easy access to farms in the event of flooding. It is important to protect plants and crops from malicious destruction arising from events such as farmer-herdsmen conflicts [7, 8, 9, 10]. This challenge can be addressed by infusing mobility into plants. The paper proposes non-terrestrial agriculture. The existing approach focuses on terrestrial agriculture [11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19] and does not consider extreme flooding [20, 21, 22, 23].