**1. Introduction**

Recently, the agricultural domain is facing numerous challenges related to the need to permanently increase productivity, climate change management, crop health monitoring, and irrigation water management, as well as fertilization optimization. To address these constraints, IoT technology is opening up new promising technological paths and pushing the future of agriculture to the next level. Indeed, many

advantages are offered by IoT systems for intelligent farming, such as a panoply of sensor networks to optimize irrigation and agricultural inputs management, as well as improvement of the agricultural engine guidance and maintenance. Agricultural sensors implemented in the fields are estimated to reach 12 million by 2023, this revolution of smart devices will provide many remote facilities to manage seeds, irrigation, fertilizers, and early disease detection by collecting real-time data about the field and the environment. We mean by intelligent farming the integration of smartness in the farming processes, not only for the land management but also in the other chain links notably logistics and supply chain, transportation [1–4], as well as storage. The need for automation in the agricultural domain to overcome the constraints imposed by classical methods of farming became more essential than before. Furthermore, the availability of water in a sufficient quantity and quality has been recently become alarming because of the climate change phenomenon. Consequently, many technological, economical, and social policies have to be implemented according to many recent studies that focused on water management topics [5]. Thanks to the smart and low-cost dedicated sensors, irrigation tasks will be precise and the productivity will be rapidly increased, without ignoring the important contribution in hydrological resources preservation. Traceability of the food supply chain (FSC) is an important key factor to ensure the quality and safety of food transportation and identification in a regulatory manner, as well as protect perishable food against waste. Dairy farming is another farming process that has taken benefits from the integration of information and communication technology in the farming industry, it helps farmers to adopt more accurate practices in dairy management [6] to monitor the heat of oestrus to improve reproduction, as well as the animal health check and monitoring [7].

Highly intelligent farming or high intelligent farming are two concepts that refer to the use of high tech in farming processes to enhance the efficiency of daily work. In fact, using technological innovation in farming is not new, but the rise of some disciplines, such as IoT, fog computing, satellites, drones, smartphones, and Blockchain, are things that will push smart agriculture and precise farming industries to a high level in the coming years. We believe that implementing ICT in the farming world will enable farmers to better understand and interact with their farms by collecting data about changing variables and giving commands according to the situations. All of these technologies will give the ability to the farms to make a big transition from being simple physical environments to highly intelligent and abstract worlds.

Despite the existence of several studies and surveys that introduce the issue of integrating ICT in farming processes, we find that these surveys either focused only on one farming process or do not investigate deep enough this integration. Moreover, investigation of Blockchain technology, its benefits for the farming industry, and its required research to build sustainable development, need to be elaborated. To fill these literature gaps, we propose this survey as one of the most mature studies of its kind that presents a systematic and developed state-of-the-art for integrating ICT in the farming world.

The remainder of this work is further structured as follows: The research methodology is presented in Section 2. Then, the general review of IoT-based systems' requirements is discussed in Section 3. Next, Section 4 provides the components of an intelligent farming IoT model. After that, the open challenges resulting from IoT-fog computing integration are discussed in Section 5. The applications of Blockchain in intelligent farming and the discussion part are then presented in Section 6. The conclusion and summary are provided in Section 7.

*Digital Agriculture and Intelligent Farming Business Using Information and Communication… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102400*
