DEFINITION OF PRECISION AGRICULTURE
“The tight input at the right place and at the right time”.
OPPORTUNITIES WITH PRECISION AGRICULTURE
The major opportunity of precision agriculture is for more efficient production. This has to date been largely achieved through the development of prescription files and variation rate technology. That is, maps of the different needs of a field (e.g. fertiliser needs) coupled with machinery that can increase or decrease the rate of application depending on which location in the field the machine is.
CHALLENGES WITH PRECISION AGRICULTURE
While the definition of precision agriculture seems quite tight and well accepted, it seems that the “right time” component is usually forgotten.
The resolution of the spatial component is still generally quite broad, but it is getting better. Section control used to be that a 24 m wide boom spray could be divided up into sections of 6 or so spray nozzels. Now it usually means that each nozzel is an individual sections. And that the prescription file is used automatically to control the sections.
Inputs the to decision of what is right right right. Harvest map, but resolution is limited to the width of the harvester front.
HS AND PRECISION AGRICULTURE
Precision agriculture is one of the two focus-areas that HSS FoU team has that has a lot of overlap with the focus area Digitalisation of Agriculture; the other being Forecasting.