Leveraging Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence in Smart Agriculture to Enhance Food Security and Sustainable Farming: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Purpose: Achieving global food security while maintaining environmentally sustainable agricultural systems remains a critical challenge amid population growth, climate variability, and resource constraints. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have emerged as transformative technologies that support data-driven agricultural practices. This study systematically examines the applications, opportunities, challenges, and adoption factors of AI-IoT integration in smart agriculture, with particular emphasis on its potential contributions to food security and sustainable farming. Methods: A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Publications were retrieved from Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and ScienceDirect covering the period 2020-2024. From an initial 431 records, 17 empirical studies met the inclusion criteria and were analysed using narrative and thematic synthesis. Result: The review shows that AI-IoT technologies are primarily applied in crop disease detection, precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, yield prediction, and livestock health monitoring. These technologies enable real-time decision support, early disease detection, productivity improvement, and resource optimisation. However, challenges remain, including data limitations, infrastructure constraints, integration complexity, and high deployment costs. Novelty: The study proposes a layered smart agriculture framework linking technological infrastructure, application domains, adoption conditions, operational outcomes, and sustainability impacts. The findings highlight key factors necessary for successful implementation, including infrastructure readiness, affordability, technological reliability, and capacity development for farmers. Crucially, the review demonstrates that the field of AI-IoT smart agriculture is technically advanced but socio-technically incomplete: the evidence base is dominated by proof-of-concept studies from Asia, with no empirical representation from Africa or the Americas, creating what this study terms an AI-IoT agricultural equity gap that fundamentally limits the technology’s contribution to global food security. The five-layered framework introduced here provides the first inductively derived organising structure that explicitly connects AI-IoT infrastructure to SDG-aligned food security outcomes, offering a replicable analytical scaffold for future empirical and policy research in this domain.