Advances in Electrical Engineering for Sustainable Smart Agriculture: A Comprehensive Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69930/fsst.v3i1.898Keywords:
Smart Agriculture; Renewable Energy; Photovoltaic Irrigation; Agrivoltaics; Wireless Sensor NetworksAbstract
The global agricultural sector faces mounting pressure to increase productivity while reducing its environmental footprint, water consumption, and dependence on fossil fuels. Electrical engineering has emerged as a central enabler of this transition, providing the power-generation, sensing, communication, control, and automation technologies that underpin modern smart agriculture. This review situates the convergence of electrical engineering and agriculture within the broader context of climate change, freshwater scarcity, and the need to feed a growing global population sustainably. A structured narrative review of 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports published between 2008 and 2026 was conducted, drawn from IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, MDPI, Springer, and related databases, and organized around five thematic clusters: renewable power supply, sensing and communication infrastructure, machinery electrification, aerial robotics, and artificial intelligence integration. The reviewed literature shows that photovoltaic water pumping and agrivoltaic systems can reduce irrigation energy costs and diversify farm income while maintaining acceptable crop yields; energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks and low-power wide-area communication protocols extend the operational lifetime of field monitoring systems; battery-electric tractors and implements lower operating emissions but remain constrained by battery energy density and charging infrastructure; and unmanned aerial vehicles combined with machine learning substantially improve the precision of input application and crop monitoring. Electrical engineering innovations are collectively reshaping agriculture into a data-driven, energy-efficient, and more resilient sector, though widespread adoption still depends on cost reduction, interoperability standards, rural electrification, and farmer training.
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