Does Agriculture Need Computer Programming Language

Let us imagine our agriculture sticks around hoes, sickles, and scarecrow and still uses traditional transaction methods. That situation causes farmers in an unfavorable position. The impact of these issues is a significant decline number of farmers, as many as 4 million farmers and estimated that around 150 thousand hectares of agricultural land were reduced each year. This data was taken from the Central Statistics Agency, which uses two-year data from 2016-2018. Beritabersatu.com reported these conditions are certainly not without cause. The leading cause is the assumption of the lack of profits from agricultural land and production, which resulted in the inability to fulfil daily needs.

Based on those issues, it is a hope that the young generation would be interested in becoming a farmer. The farmer who is not only mastered in cultivation and post-harvest but also knowledgeable on how to integrate technology in agriculture, especially the application of computer programming to optimize agriculture processes.

Some interesting questions were raised on the website news.mit.edu, Why there is a need to import food? Isn’t it possible to modify the weather so that the food can be produced in different regions? However, the situation we are facing now is that farmers are categorized based on the commodity since a specific agricultural product cannot be planted in a different area.

Can we plant a specific type of plants in any random area? What is the role of technology? Is it possible to employ a computer to control the whole system of the supply chain? It includes facilitating soil tillage, planting, irrigation water management, and nutrient control, detecting weather and pests, harvesting, recording, and storing related data to the clouds such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. The obvious answer to all those questions is coding. In other words, use computers to do whatever we want by using programming languages.

hackr.io and computer.org reported several best programming languages of 2020. The first one is Python programming language. The language is quite easy to learn and understand, as well as fast and widely used for web applications such as Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, GUI-based desktop applications, machine learning, data science, and network servers. Python is suitable for beginners who want to learn computer programming languages. On the other hand, python is an open-source that has ever-growing community support. The second programming language is Java. This programming language is often used to build Android-based applications so that it can be an alternative for farmers who want to make smart farming coding with an Android-based smartphone. There is also the C / C ++ language. Almost all low-level systems such as operating systems and file systems are written in C / C ++.

Of course, what is the meaning of coding if there is no hardware. Some hardware can be used by farmers to build an agriculture control system, such as Arduino development board. This board is equipped with either ATmega328 microcontroller or ATmega2560 depending on the needs of sensors and controlled devices. Additionally, Farmers can use Raspberry Pi development board if needed to add a camera as a crop image acquisition tool. The Arduino board is programmed using the C / C ++ programming language while the Raspberry Pi board can be programmed using Python programming language.

The next question is, what if the farmer cannot do programming? Does it mean no control system would be developed? There are tons of free online training on automation of greenhouses, hydroponics, fertigation, sortation. Besides, many mobile apps provide a particular control for agriculture production. Training can be the perfect way to support young people that are not knowledgeable enough to start farming. By training, young people would have clarity on where to start. This training can be a government initiative by allocating bonuses to motivate farmers. By training and extra financial support would make farming more attractive to millennials.