Crop monitoring system utilizes IoT, AI and other tech to optimize yields, lower costs

Researchers from South Dakota State University presented a high-tech system to help farmers optimize crop yields while lowering costs at the 2025 annual meeting of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. The system, detailed in Integrating IoT and secure data transmission in a crop monitoring system, tracks and analyzes crop development through data collected by sensors, biosensors, the Internet of Things and AI.

While the majority of projects that build systems utilizing IoT only simulate post-quantum security on supercomputers, the work presented by SDSU Professor Lin Wei and his Ph.D. student Manish Shrestha implemented security in a real-world end-to-end, sensor-to-cloud, application.

“This work demonstrated that strong, future-proof security can run directly on small devices, potentially eliminating the need for large servers to protect IoT data,” Shrestha said. “This ensures farming data remains private, verifiable and resilient—even against future quantum computer attacks.”

Protecting farmers’ data collected by the system was imperative to Shrestha and the team, who used advanced security protocols, encryption and cryptography to ensure the massive amount of data was safe while being stored and analyzed in the cloud. Included in the data were measurements of soil conditions such as temperature, humidity and available nutrients; potential plant stresses such as nutrient deficiencies, disease presence and pest threats; and environmental factors.

Once data from all of these measurements was analyzed by the researchers, it was presented to farmers, allowing them to make more informed decisions on their management practices, including irrigation, fertilization, disease and pest control, without risking their operation’s information.

The importance of heightened cybersecurity practices in agriculture applications was a hot topic at the meeting.

“Our research received considerable attention, with many experts emphasizing how cybersecurity must be a core component when developing smart farming technologies,” Shrestha said. “There was a common thread of people recognizing the need for a secure infrastructure for all the data farmers are collecting.”

The research team plans to improve their system in the near future by speeding up sensor data processing and using a solar-powered battery rather than a chemical one to lengthen the time between charges, among other updates.

More information: Manish Man Shrestha et al, Integrating IoT and secure data transmission in a crop monitoring system, 2025 Toronto, Ontario, Canada July 13-16, 2025 (2025). DOI: 10.13031/aim.202500564