Fog-to-Cloud computing for farming: low-cost technologies, data exchange, and animal welfare

Abstract

Coordinated fog-to-cloud computing systems are expected to expedite the evolution of cloud-based smart farming, towards openness and data sharing, while making farming economically sustainable for smaller farms. We demonstrate a fog-to-cloud enabled animal farming system that not only deploys low-cost technology for data collection and sharing, but also uniquely considers animal welfare and quality-of-life. On an practical example of a multi-master replication of SQL Server databases between Microsoft Azure Cloud and multiple fog nodes on the farm, we show that fog-based systems can help improve performance, scale to higher amounts of database entries, pre-process data with aid of machine learning, while providing reliability of the system in an easy-to-use fashion. Considerations of animal welfare, cloud-based data analysis, fog-enabled farming along with mobile applications are envisioned as common place for future farmers and consumers alike, and are in line with a recent trends connecting animal welfare, human health and the environment.