## 2 Food Security: A Global Challenge in View of Soil Pollutants and Heavy Metal Toxicants
### Smart Farming Initiatives Is the Need of the Hour  
With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT), smart devices have reached into all facets of our day-to-day life, i.e., healthcare and wellness, smart homes, automobile and logistics, intelligent cities and industries. In recent decades, agriculture has seen a series of technological changes, increasingly industrialized and technologically driven. Through different agriculture-based smart devices, farmers today now have greater control over animal husbandry and cultivation processes, making them more predictable and productive. This, along with the rising market demand for agricultural products, has helped to increase the worldwide proliferation of intelligent agriculture technologies. It is worth noting that for the year 2020, IoT's agricultural market share reached $5.6 billion [57].  
Modern agriculture can be addressed in several respects. For instance, AgriTech refers to the use of technology in the domain of agriculture [58]. In addition, intelligent agriculture is primarily used to describe the use of IoT-based agricultural solutions. With IoT sensors, farmers can make informed decisions and develop various parameters of their work, i.e., cattle to crop production, in order to collect environmental and machine metrics. For example, farmers can decide exactly how much pesticide and fertilizer is to be utilized to optimize productivity by using smart agriculture sensors for monitoring crop status. The same applies to the concept of intelligent farming. Figure 3 shows a broader perspective on a modern-day agricultural model, which incorporates various wireless sensor nodes to enable IoT-based farming with satellite communication, where different ground sensors are deployed which communicate with the cloud computing node for data processing and analysis, so that farmers can make correct decisions.  
Although smart IoT and industrial IoT are not as common as consumer-connected devices, the market continues to be very competitive. IoT technologies are increasingly being implemented for agriculture. COVID-19 has had a positive impact on IoT market share in agriculture. Indeed, the smart framing market share is expected to hit $6.2 billion by the end of 2021, as reported recently [57]. It is evident that COVID-19 has made a significant impact on the farming sector across the world. However, the agricultural sector is showing potential to make a strong comeback by leveraging positive government policies which indicate adoption of advanced technologies by making substantial investment in the agricultural sector. This initiative will make room for IoT-based agricultural solutions as a prominent business strategy, thus causing a reasonable increment in crop production. However, in the current situation, the market is expected to show a decline up to 0.8% for the first two quarters of year 2021 compared to 2020 and this trend will show a positive growth from 2022 onwards [59]. In addition to this, the smart world agriculture market is projected to triple to 15.3 billion dollars by 2025, compared to just over 5 billion dollars back in 2016 [60]. If the sector continues to expand, there will still be plenty of opportunities for companies. In the coming years, creating IoT products for agriculture will distinguish companies as early adopters, thus helping to pave the way for success. Today, the innovations on our immediate horizon include autonomous machines which have the capacity to pluck and pick fruits and vegetables from the respective plantation. A highly sophisticated sensing system includes microscopic sensors and cameras that help farmers track the growth of crops and warn them when something is wrong or inform them of the optimum time to harvest. The Bonirob developed by Deepfield  
Figure 3: Modern day agriculture. Labs [61] can take a soil sample, liquidize it, and then analyze its pH and phosphorus levels in real time.