Precision Agriculture

Precision Agriculture Topics

Precision Agriculture is a farming management concept based on observing, measuring, and responding to variability in crops and soils within fields. These field variabilities contain many components that can be difficult to compute and quantify. As a result, technology has advanced to offset some of these challenges. Precision agriculture technology can generally be grouped into two categories: those that ensure accuracy and those meant to enhance farming operations. Both technology categories can be used to efficiently aid in crop production. By combining accuracy and enhancement technologies, farmers are able to create a decision support system for an entire operation and implement site-specific management, thereby maximizing profits and minimizing excessive resource use. Moreover, consultants, retailers, and other agriculture entities offer a variety of precision agriculture services that include precision soil sampling, creating annual production summaries and maps per field, profit mapping, and site-specific planning. These companies tend to utilize the spatial data collected by machinery and technology for individual field analysis but also aggregate data across farms for more in-depth analysis, such as crop performance by soil types and farm profitability comparisons.

A few benefits of precision agriculture that farmers have recognized include the following:

• reduced overlap areas leading to cost savings on inputs (e.g., seed, fertilizer, etc.)
• incremental improvement in crop yields
• improved overall machine and implement efficiency
• reduced operator fatigue
• increased operator visibility during harvest (able to see rows clearly), leading to increased field efficiency, especially when operating during night hours
• as-applied maps for field documentation, recordkeeping, and use within farm management information systems (FMIS) or other agricultural data management services

In addition to cost-cutting and energy consumption— both, human and machine—precision agriculture technologies have reduced environmental impacts, such as off-site transport of nutrients from fields that can negatively affect water quality.

Additional Resources:

• Ohio Field Crops Precision Ag Page