With the rapid growth of population and the increasing demand for food worldwide, improving productivity in farming procedures is essential. Smart farming is a concept that emphasizes the use of modern technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance productivity in farming practices. In a smart farming scenario, large amounts of data are collected from diverse sources such as wireless sensor networks, network-connected weather stations, monitoring cameras, and smartphones. These data are valuable resources to be used in data-driven services and decision support systems (DSS) in farming applications. However, one of the major challenges with these large amounts of agriculture data is their immense diversity in terms of format and meaning. Moreover, the different services and technologies in a smart farming ecosystem have limited capability to work together due to the lack of standardized practices for data and system integration. These issues create a significant challenge in cooperative service provision, data and technology integration, and data-sharing practices. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose the platform approach, a design approach intended to guide building effective, reliable, and robust smart farming systems. The proposed platform approach considers six requirements for seamless integration, processing, and use of farm data. These requirements in a smart farming platform include interoperability, reliability, scalability, real-time data processing, end-to-end security and privacy, and standardized regulations and policies. A smart farming platform that considers these requirements leads to increased productivity, profitability, and performance of connected smart farms. In this paper, we aim at introducing the platform approach concept for smart farming and reviewing the requirements for this approach.

Smart farming aims to improve farming using modern technologies and smart devices. Smart devices help farmers to collect and analyze data regarding different aspects of their business. These data are utilized by various stakeholders, including farmers, technology providers, supply chain investigators, and agricultural service providers. These data sources can be considered big data due to their volume, velocity, and variety. The wide use of data collection and communication technologies has increased concerns about the privacy of farmers and their data. Although some previous studies have reviewed the security aspects of smart farming, the privacy challenges and solutions are not sufficiently explored in the literature. In this paper, we present a holistic review of big data privacy in smart farming. The paper utilizes a data lifecycle schema and describes privacy concerns and requirements in smart farming in each of the phases of this data lifecycle. Moreover, it provides a comprehensive review of the existing solutions and the state-of-the-art technologies that can enhance data privacy in smart farming.