Integrating Artificial Intelligence and IoT for Precision Farming: A Review of Agriculture 4.0 Technologies, Applications, and Challenges
TL;DR
This review synthesizes the current body of literature on AI-IoT integration in precision farming, covering the core enabling technologies — smart sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, geographic information systems, GIS, edge and cloud computing, and block chain-based traceability — and the layered architecture through which they combine into functioning smart-farming systems.
Abstract
Agriculture 4.0 marks a decisive shift from mechanized and chemically intensive farming toward a data-driven, automated, and connected model of food production. At the center of this shift lies the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), which together allow farms to sense, interpret, and act on field conditions with a precision that manual methods cannot match. This review synthesizes the current body of literature on AI-IoT integration in precision farming, covering the core enabling technologies — smart sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), geographic information systems (GIS), edge and cloud computing, and block chain-based traceability — and the layered architecture through which they combine into functioning smart-farming systems. Drawing on peer-reviewed studies published largely between 2019 and 2025, the review examines representative applications in smart irrigation, crop-disease detection, yield prediction, and supply-chain traceability, consolidates the recurring barriers reported across this literature, and provides a detailed, yearordered comparison of technique, dataset, performance metrics, and reported limitations across ten representative studies. The review concludes by outlining research gaps — particularly around affordable edge-AI models, interoperable data standards, and region-specific validation in smallholder contexts such as India — that merit attention in future work.
