Bridging Smart Agriculture: Growing Demands for Precision Farming
Smart agriculture is rapidly reshaping both crop and animal farming, such as cash crop fields, vineyards, coffee estates, green houses and cattle ranches as population growth, climate change, and labor shortages drive the need for innovative food production solutions. Precision farming lies at the center of this transformation, using IoT sensors, AI-driven analytics, and data-based decision-making to automate processes, enhance yields, and optimize resource efficiency and costs across agricultural systems. Besides productivity gains, these technologies support sustainability by improving energy use, reducing carbon emissions, enhancing animal welfare, and strengthening climate resilience, while also mitigating food security risks amplified by geopolitical tensions such as the Russia-Ukraine war.
Reflecting this trend, Statista reports that by 2024, over half of the world’s farmers had adopted or shown interest in at least one new agricultural technology in their farms. Mordor Intelligence further highlights the market’s momentum, valuing the global smart farming industry at USD 18.2 billion in 2025 and projects it to reach USD 32.6 billion by 2030, representing a CAGR of 12.33%.
Industry: Agriculture
Application: Smart Farming Gateway
Solution: DFI ASL051 2.5” Industrial SBC
Smart Agriculture Framework
A smart agriculture framework is a layered ecosystem that integrates technology, data, and decision-making to optimize productivity, sustainability, and efficiency. The framework spans from edge-level sensing to cloud-based analytics and AI-driven farm management:
Sensing Layer
This foundational layer collects real-time data from edge devices in the farm environment:
- IoT Sensors: Measure soil moisture, temperature, humidity, nutrient levels, water levels, light intensity, and livestock health.
- Drones & Satellites: Monitor crop growth, detect pests or disease, and provide aerial imaging for large farms.
- Machinery Data: Capture operational metrics from tractors, harvesters, irrigation systems, and greenhouses.
Network Layer
The network layer ensures seamless connectivity between sensors, devices, and gateways using Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, 4G/5G, or satellite network. It also links gateways to cloud platforms for centralized data storage, management, and analysis.
Gateway Layer
Gateways aggregate and preprocess data locally, filtering and prioritizing information before sending it to the cloud. They also support real-time processing for immediate decision-making, such as automated irrigation and climate control.
Cloud Layer
The cloud layer serves as the intelligence hub of smart agriculture, unifying diverse farm data into centralized databases and generating predictive insights for farm management:
- Database: Centralized storage that integrates heterogeneous data sources (crop, soil, weather, machinery) into unified databases.
- AI Analytics: Use AI and Machine Learning models to predict crop yields, disease outbreaks, irrigation needs, and optimal fertilizer application, turning data into actionable energy-efficient management strategies.
- Farm Management: Provides dashboards for monitoring farm conditions, alerts, operational planning and compliance reports for smarter, data-driven farming.
Last Mile Challenges in AIoT Farming
Although AI and automation bring significant advantages, the adoption of smart agriculture often falters at the “last mile.” The transition from innovation to practical deployment is slowed by real-world challenges that farmers and solution providers cannot ignore. In addition to technology and connectivity limitations, external pressures—such as unpredictable climate events, natural disasters causing crop losses, pest outbreaks, and a widening labor and skills gap—make farmers hesitant to invest in advanced systems. These uncertainties compound the risks of adoption and create a complex environment where innovation must prove its value under tough conditions.
Against this backdrop, several critical barriers stand out as key reasons why the last mile of AIoT in farming remains difficult to bridge:
● Connectivity Gaps
Rural and remote farms often lack reliable broadband or cellular networks, limiting the real-time use of IoT sensors, drones, edge devices, and cloud analytics. Latency further hinders AI-driven decisions that depend on instant feedback. While satellite or private networks are options, their cost can be prohibitive.
● Data Fragmentation & Interoperability
Agritech from different vendors often run on proprietary platforms, which creates data silos. Without smooth interoperability and unified platforms, precision farming cannot reach its full potential.
● Harsh Farming Environment
Extreme heat, humidity, dust, and mud strain equipment durability and reliability. Limited access to stable power further challenges advanced tool usage in remote fields. Rugged and energy-efficient designs are essential for long-term performance in harsh agricultural conditions.
● AIoT Agriculture Data Security
AI and digital tools collect and generate sensitive data ranging from land and crop metrics to livestock, climate, machinery, and financial records. Much of this information is sensitive, with farmers worried about privacy and agri-businesses focused on protecting trade secrets. Since agricultural data is valuable for the entire value chain, e.g. for forecasting, product development, and insurance, strong cybersecurity and compliance with regulations like the NIS-2 Directive and Cyber Resilience Act (CRA, entering into force in European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA) in 2024, applicable by 2027) are critical to protect this data across the value chain.
Cross-Regional Smart Farming in Europe
These last-mile challenges are not theoretical—they are realities faced by farmers and solution providers.
One of DFI’s customers, a European smart farming solution distributor, serves a wide range of farms, such as vineyards, greenhouses, and open-field farms and ranches across the region. Their end users all required systems that could monitor critical farming parameters in real time, issue instant alerts, and support automated irrigation control.
Since these European operators manage large-scale, multinational farms, the solution also needed a centralized cloud platform for AI analytics to provide actionable insights for cost and resource optimization. These insights needed to to be seamlessly relayed back to edge devices for real-time actions, with all data exchanges fully compliant with CRA regulations, to achieve efficient closed-loop, cross-regional farm management.
This architecture placed gateways at the core of the system: they had to preprocess sensing data before forwarding it to the clouds, while also delivering actionable insights and instructions directly to field devices. To bring this vision to life, the customer needed a rugged, compact, and low-power industrial computer capable of ultra-low latency communication and full CRA-compliant cybersecurity—an area where DFI was uniquely positioned to deliver.
DFI ASL051 2.5” SBC Bridges the Last-Mile Connectivity Gaps in Smart Farming
Among compact industrial computers, DFI’s latest 2.5” SBC ASL051 stands out for its edge AI performance, real-time connectivity, rugged low-power design, and security compliance.
Edge AI Capabilities
Powered by the Intel® Atom x7000RE series, the ASL051 supports both Amston Lake RE and Twin Lake processors and delivers efficient edge AI performance via 8 CPU+iGPU cores. With Intel® AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions 2), VNNI (Vector Neural Network Instructions), and Intel® UHD Graphics featuring up to 32 EUs with INT8 acceleration, the ASL051 enables low-latency AI inference for vision and analytics tasks. This allows actions such as anomaly detection or predictive adjustments to be executed at the edge, reducing dependency on cloud latency.
Real-Time Communication with TCC/TSN
Equipped with rich I/O, dual 2.5GbE ports and 4G/5G expansion, the ASL051 also supports Intel® Time Coordinated Computing (TCC) and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) (Amston Lake platform only), ensuring ultra-low latency data transmission. This is essential in precision farming where immediate responses, such as activating irrigation, adjusting climate control, or equipment coordination, directly impact yields and resource efficiency.
Optimized for Outdoor Deployment
DFI ASL051 combines ultra-low energy consumption of 6–12W within a compact 2.5” form factor, making it ideal for edge deployments. Designed for reliability in the field, it also supports wide-temperature tolerance -40°C to 85°C, 12V DC input, and versatile interfaces such as COM, DIO, M.2, and Nano-SIM slots for seamless integration with field devices. Its low power consumption, rugged durability, and cost-effectiveness make ASL051 an ideal for large-scale smart farming projects.
Robust Security and Streamlined Management
Built with dTPM 2.0 and backed by DFI’s IEC 62443-4-1 certification, the ASL051 ensures secure product development from the ground up, adhering to the highest industry security standards. Tailored for industrial environments where Linux OS dominates, this board supports Linux x86 platforms that enables seamless integration across far-edge AIoT devices and cloud systems. In addition, through close collaboration with Canonical, the ASL051 is available to be preloaded with Ubuntu Pro out of the box. Security updates are critical to comply with key device regulations such as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), and Ubuntu Pro for Devices provides an automated way of receiving vital software packages and security updates for 10 years. Included in Ubuntu Pro, the systems management tool Landscape, with features like over-the-air (OTA) monitoring, maintenance, and updates, allows gateways powered by DFI’s ASL051 to significantly reduce on-site maintenance while safeguarding sensitive agricultural data.
With exceptional durability, wide-range support for latest AI technologies, and full compliance with modern security standards, DFI’s ASL051 enabled the customer to rapidly develop smart farming gateways and seize new market opportunities.
DFI 2.5” SBCs Benefits as Gateways
Besides the ASL051, DFI’s 2.5” SBC lineup offers versatile gateway solutions across industries, delivering the following advantages:
Compact Size with Rich I/O: A small-footprint, low-power design combined with extensive I/O makes DFI’s SBCs ideal for diverse gateway applications.
High Durability & Long-Term Supply: Designed for outdoor durability, DFI’s SBCs deliver exceptional reliability with an RMA rate below 0.1%, backed by up to 15 years of product lifecycle support.
Wide Range & Low-Latency Options: Multiple COTS configurations, including support for TCC/TSN, ensure ultra-low latency performance to meet varied customer gateway needs.
AI Integration and Cybersecurity Compliance: Powered by SoCs, the SBCs efficiently allocate computing resources for real-time edge responses. By bundling Ubuntu Pro with these SBCs, developers can benefit from secure communication between edge devices and clouds for advanced AI analytics, while strengthening their compliance posture in light of the CRA. With Landscape, they receive centralized OTA monitoring, updates and maintenance to reduce on-site intervention and strengthen overall system security.
Leveraging these advantages, DFI’s SBCs have helped customers accelerate gateway deployment and system implementation across industrial automation, surveillance, and retail intelligence, like AI assistant, HMI, kiosks. 
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