Use of IoT Tech to Attract Millennial Generation to Agriculture as Farmers Age

Use of IoT tech to attract millennial generation to agriculture as farmers age. Indonesia’s agricultural sector is facing a decline in its workforce as many young people in rural areas prefer moving to cities to earn a living.

According to experts, the modernization of the country’s agriculture should be promoted so more educated young people are willing to return to their villages to farm.

The use of modern technology, such as the Internet of things (IoT), can hopefully increase the interest of millennials, people born between 1981 and 1996, in agriculture as the farmer demographic in Indonesia has started to age.

Agriculture as Farmers Age

“With the use of technology in agriculture, we hope we can attract youngsters to work in the agricultural sector as it is very rare to find young farmers in the field nowadays,” the head of the Commission on Pesticide’s technical team, Dadang, said in a discussion with reporters in Jakarta on Dec 12.

Agricultural technology startup Habibi Garden’s chief executive officer, Irsan Rajamin, said that the utilization of IoT technology could be a magnet for millennials and youth and bring them into the agricultural industry.  

“Millennials cannot take their eyes off of their phones, even for just an hour, so we just have to make their habits more productive,” he said at the same event.

Habibi Garden uses modern technology such as IoT and a digital application to help farmers. By connecting sensors and irrigation systems in the farms to the internet and providing data based on machine learning, Habibi Garden can help farmers monitor and maintain their farms and crops remotely.

“[The crop’s condition] can be monitored with our application, so young farmers can be aware of the conditions of their crops in the village, even when they are away in town,” he said.

He added that by using a Habibi Pump Controller, an automated and remotely controlled drip irrigation system in his app, farmers could improve the efficiency of the use of water by up to 70 percent.

Agriculture as Farmers Age

Habibi Garden also provided an automatic station that could predict weather conditions that might support the growth of pests and crop diseases. The app would then notify the farmers so they could take necessary preventive measures, such as putting pesticides on their crops, he said.

However, introducing modern agricultural technologies to existing farmers was a challenge for agriculture modernization. “Even when the technology is already advanced, farmers cannot tap into its potential if they didn’t have the necessary abilities,” Irsan said.

Irsan added that he, through his company, had collaborated with the provincial administration of West Java to educate local farmers and landowners about new agricultural technologies. Concern over the lack of youth participating in agriculture had increased amid the aging demography of Indonesian farmers.

Agriculture as Farmers Age

Statistics Indonesia (BPS) showed that the number of farmers below the age of 25 years was 273,839, only about 1 percent of the 27 million in the country as of 2018, and those between 25 and 34 years numbered 2.9 million, 10.6 percent.

“The number of youth participating in agriculture is very small,” agriculture company Syngenta’s head of business sustainability, Midzon Johannis, said.

He added that in comparison with the digitalized transportation industry, the long recovery of investment in agriculture could also be an intimidating factor discouraging youth’s participation in farms.

“In the digitalized transportation sector, for example, people can earn money every day, but people have to wait for four months to harvest their agricultural crops and earn money from their investment,” he said.

To formulate measures on how to attract more millennials to agriculture, Agriculture Minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo held a meeting with Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB) rector Arif Satria on Nov. 11.

The meeting discussed future collaborations between the ministry and the institute in facing the Industry 4.0 era. “The Agriculture Ministry and the IPB have cooperated in developing millennial farmers to strengthen food security,” Arif said as quoted in an Agriculture Ministry press release. Use of IoT tech to attract millennial generation to agriculture as farmers age (mfp, The Jakarta Post)