Technological revolutions in smart farming: Current trends, challenges & future directions

With increasing population, the demand for agricultural productivity is rising to meet the goal of “Zero Hunger”. Consequently, farmers have optimized the agricultural activities in a sustainable way with the modern technologies. This integration has boosted the agriculture production due to high potentiality in assisting the farmers. The impulse towards the technological advancement has revived the traditional agriculture methods and resulted in eco-friendly, sustainable, and efficient farming. This has revolutionized the era of smart farming which primarily alliance with modern technologies like, big data, machine learning, deep learning, swarm intelligence, internet-of-things, block chain, robotics and autonomous system, cloud-fog-edge computing, cyber physical systems, and generative adversarial networks (GAN). To cater the same, a detailed survey on ten hot-spots of smart farming is presented in this paper. The survey covers the technology-wise state-of-the-art methods along with their application domains. Moreover, the publicly available data sets with existing research challenges are investigated. Lastly, the paper concludes with suggestions to the identified problems and possible future research directions.