Agricultural Big Data is a set of technologies that allows responding to the challenges of the new data era. In conjunction with machine learning, farmers can use data to address problems such as farmers’ decision making, water management, soil management, crop management, and livestock management. Crop management includes yield prediction, disease detection, weed detection, crop quality, and species recognition. On the other hand, livestock management considers animal welfare and livestock production. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the evidence regarding the challenges involved in implementing machine learning in agricultural Big Data. We conducted a systematic literature review applying the PRISMA protocol. This review includes 30 papers published from 2015 to 2020. We develop a framework that summarizes the main challenges encountered, machine learning techniques, and the leading technologies used. A significant challenge is the design of agricultural Big Data architectures due to the need to modify the set of technologies adapting the machine learning techniques as the volume of data increases.

Sustainable agriculture is currently being challenged under climate change scenarios since extreme environmental processes disrupt and diminish global food production. For example, drought-induced increases in plant diseases and rainfall caused a decrease in food production. Machine Learning and Agricultural Big Data are high-performance computing technologies that allow analyzing a large amount of data to understand agricultural production. Machine Learning and Agricultural Big Data are high-performance computing technologies that allow the processing and analysis of large amounts of heterogeneous data for which intelligent IT and high-resolution remote sensing techniques are required. However, the selection of ML algorithms depends on the types of data to be used. Therefore, agricultural scientists need to understand the data and the sources from which they are derived. These data can be structured, such as temperature and humidity data, which are usually numerical (e.g., float); semi-structured, such as those from spreadsheets and information repositories, since these data types are not previously defined and are stored in No-SQL databases; and unstructured, such as those from files such as PDF, TIFF, and satellite images, since they have not been processed and therefore are not stored in any database but in repositories (e.g., Hadoop). This study provides insight into the data types used in Agricultural Big Data along with their main challenges and trends. It analyzes 43 papers selected through the protocol proposed by Kitchenham and Charters and validated with the PRISMA criteria. It was found that the primary data sources are Databases, Sensors, Cameras, GPS, and Remote Sensing, which capture data stored in Platforms such as Hadoop, Cloud Computing, and Google Earth Engine. In the future, Data Lakes will allow for data integration across different platforms, as they provide representation models of other data types and the relationships between them, improving the quality of the data to be integrated.

Agricultural Big Data is a set of technologies that allows responding to the challenges of the new data era. In conjunction with machine learning, farmers can use data to address different problems such as farmers' decision-making, crops, weeds, animal research, land, food availability and security, weather, and climate change. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the evidence regarding the challenges involved in implementing machine learning in Agricultural Big Data. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review applying the PRISMA protocol. This review includes 30 papers, published from 2015 to 2020. We develop a framework that summarizes the main challenges encountered, the use of machine learning techniques, as well as the main technologies used. A major challenge is the design of Agricultural Big Data architectures, due to the need to modify the set of technologies adapting the machine learning techniques, as the volume of data increases.