Agriculture's technological makeover

With agriculture becoming a knowledge-intensive industry, pervasive computing is poised to help solve one of the world's most pressing challenges of information dissemination, marketing products, and conducting business. These intelligent systems measure light reflectance from leaves and correlate it to nitrogen levels in the soil, and control application systems then apply the optimal amounts of fertilizer. John Deere developed a prototype of an automatic tractor that uses satellite signals to follow pre-programmed routes without a human driver. It is expected that with the availability of more computation combined with sensing and networking, new forms of farming will emerge. Farmers can obtain corresponding data from hyperspectral measurements of plants, which record spectrums of several hundred wavelengths. This data contains information about changes in a plant's pigment composition, which indicates metabolic processes involved in responses to biotic or abiotic stress.