Smart controlled environment agriculture methods: a holistic review

Agriculture is the basic necessity all over the world which provides food for the existence of humans. India is expected to be home to 1.6 billion people by 2050, and India has to double the food production from the current level of 260 MT to feed the entire population. Providing food for growing population is becoming tedious and the deficiency of fertile lands makes it more difficult to increase the production beyond a certain limit. Under such scenario, maximizing the production per unit area using precision technologies in agriculture will help to achieve the same. Smart technologies are getting attention in every domain by the inclusion of advanced technologies like Big data analytics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) etc. This article reviews the current literature published in the stream controlled environment agriculture like soil less hydroponics, aquaponics, nutrient film technique and aeroponics for the period of 1999-2020. In this article, different types of soilless agriculture, their advantages over traditional soil methods, different types of sensors employed in agriculture, implementation of recent precision technologies in soilless agriculture are discussed. The review suggests that "smart farming" is an emerging trend in the area of agriculture, which makes, every individual to practice farming and grow vegetables and fruits on their own in their house without soil. However, future research ideas should focus on areas of "real time monitoring of nutrition solution management and pest management" for the plants growing in controlled environment to maximize the production are also discussed.