Internet of Plants (IoP) Empowers Bottom-up Innovations in Greenhouse Horticulture

Agriculture can be defined as a kind of the “Monodzukuri” industry (manufacturing industry) that utilizes crop photosynthesis to generate products (photosynthates). Agricultural production entirely depends on crop physioecological processes, such as photosynthesis, transpiration, translocation, and vegetative and reproductive growth, which are strongly affected by environmental conditions and farming technologies in crop fields and greenhouses. Since the beginning of agriculture, visualizing time-series data on crop physioecological processes and applying these data in everyday farm work have been impossible because of the difficulties in measuring crop physioecological processes. This invisibility of crop physioecological processes hinders not only farmers’ inventive ideas but also Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive evolution and improvements in everyday farming to achieve demand-oriented crop production. Therefore, we propose an innovative concept, the “Internet of Plants (IoP),” as a regional information infrastructure for smart agriculture. This concept is driven by a cloud computing system (IoP Cloud), which is equipped with physioecological and farming support AI engines that visualize, functionalize and share highly explainable information about crop physioecological processes and farming technologies. The IoP is expected to facilitate the bottom-up evolution of agriculture, which will be driven by smart farmers empowered by IoP functions.