It is more than likely that if you are directly involved in the agricultural world at some point you’ve heard about precision managed farmland near bangalore. Just like the tablet computers today, or the Macarena in the 1990s, precision agriculture is that unavoidable thing that everyone is talking about and with good reason. With a promise of dramatically increasing productivity by integrating 21st century agriculture technology into the farm, one can’t help but to get excited about all the potential benefits. And since precision agriculture relies on advanced on-board computing systems you can expect tomorrow’s tractors to more closely resemble the car from Knight Rider than your dad’s John Deere.
The premise behind precision agriculture is simple; since terrains are not uniform in most of their dimensions such as soil composition, nutritional needs, crop yields, and pest/disease presence, then the traditional practice of treating them uniformly is hardly ideal. Precision agriculture intends to solve this problem by splitting each block into a grid of smaller plots of land and micromanaging them individually, or performing “site specific management” as we say in agriculture. Of course this is too big a task for people to do with since it requires collecting and analyzing millions of pieces of data. This is where technology comes into play with a variety of advanced technologies such as GPS systems, yield monitors, variable rate applicators, and geospatial statistical analysis software.
As with any successful scientific endeavor, a good precision agriculture process requires accurate data. A good place to start is usually by generating soil composition and yield maps of the blocks you wish to analyze. These maps represent the large numbers of samples that will be the basic input for geospatial statistical analysis software that will produce recommendations for different processes such as fertilization, sowing density, and pest/disease control.
