Smart Rice Precision Farming Schemes in Sub-Saharan Africa: Process and Architecture

Smart farming integrates information, communication, and control technologies in agricultural practices. Recently, crop enterprise management through smart precision farming technologies are antidotes to uncontrollable soil and environmental factors compounded by climate change. Farm production planning utilizes enormous data generated from the field by human agents and IoT devices, but is often unreliable and inaccurate. These cause low yield, high losses, inferior quality of farm produce, overuse or underuse of fertilizers, increased costs, and inefficient farm management. Traditionally, analyzing rice cropping yields is time-inefficient and tasking, which led to quicker IoT adoption. Aside insufficient data sharing infrastructure, data privacy problem is widespread The blockchain technology is useful for verifying the reliability, accuracy, and authenticity of IoT data generated from fields for the production planning. In the future, dynamic systems (smart rice farming) and model-based control systems can be applied to understand the physical process and valuable factors of production. This paper provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art process and architectural survey on impacts of uncontrollable environmental factors, smart precision framework, security and privacy architectures or solutions for improving rice crop production. Again, a new taxonomy is developed to guide researchers, advance the course of rice production, and improve yields across sub-Saharan Africa.