Precision agriculture is a farming methodology that analyzes temporal and geographical variability to increase agricultural production sustainability. Precision agriculture employs cutting-edge technology such as satellite images and field mapping to aid in yield optimization, crop management, and crop quality and profitability. Precision agriculture differs from conventional agriculture in that it manages fields by watching, measuring, and reacting to inter and intra-field variability in crops rather than as a unified block.
The goal is to define a decision support system for whole farm management with the intent to optimize returns while conserving resources, thus contributing to the development of sustainable agriculture, allowing it to solve both economic and ecological problems while ensuring profitability and environmental protection.
Importance Of Precision Agriculture
Precision Agriculture enables farmers to make better use of crop inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides, tillage, and irrigation water. It greatly enhances crop efficiency and reduces financial costs while increasing output.
Growers usually are aware that their fields have variable yields across their landscape. These variations can be traced to farm management practices, soil properties and environmental characteristics. Soil characteristics that affect yields include texture, structure, moisture, nutrient status, organic matter, and landscape position. However, Environmental factors include weather, insects, weeds, and diseases. For a grower, it was difficult to treat the site specifically based on land variability and soil characteristics. Without technology and information, growers couldn’t easily implement strategies to enhance their production. However, with the advancement of precision agriculture and technology, growers can now make strategic decisions based on the information available, allowing them to maximize crop yield, reduce production-related expenses, and continue to be good stewards of environmental resources.
As a result, Precision Agriculture can automate and simplify data gathering and processing. It advises growers, allowing them to make management decisions quickly and efficiently, and to implement them in small areas within large fields.
Precision Agricultural Technologies and Methods:
Precision Agriculture’s various technological features make use of real-time data and software analytics, as well as hardware and software comprised of ground, aerial, and satellite equipments.
1. Variable Rate Technology (VRT): This technology enables growers to apply fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, and other farm inputs at various rates over a field based on their needs, without having to manually change rate settings on equipment or make several passes over an area. VRT is used to address spatial variability between paddocks or zones. VRT is classified into two categories.:
Map-based: a map of application rates is produced for the field prior to the farm operation.
Real-time control: decisions about what rates to apply in different locations are made using information gathered during farm operation. This requires sensors to detect necessary information ‘on-the-go’ and is usually designed for a specific job such as herbicide application in fields.
2. Digital Mapping Technology: The maps are used to capture the geographical and topographical features of a field in the form of virtual images. GPS and satellite remote sensing equipment are used for this, which creates maps that display all the field nuances and harvest states.
3. Weather Modeling: In this, weather sensors are used to gather detailed information on local climate factors, which in turn, model the probability of future disease and pest development on any field.
4. Guidance Technology: This utilizes a satellite-based positioning system to help automatically guide agricultural machines and equipment.
5. Drone Technology: Drone technology is used to take aerial images and videography of fields.
Watch this space for Part two of this blog on Applications of Precision Agriculture.
