- Precision Agriculture (PA) is essentially a philosophy of making improved management decisions across a farm at more places and more times in the season than traditionally applied in agriculture.
- Site-specific crop management (SSCM) is the application of PA to crop management, so decisions on resource application and agronomic practices are improved to better match soil and crop requirements as they change in a field.
- SSCM can be applied to managing at the individual field or whole farm scale.
- SSCM is an evolving management strategy. It is driving a shift from uniform management of inputs towards management by defined production classes and on to continuously variable management.
- Variation may occur in crop quantity (yield) and quality and both can be managed.
- Variation may be due to environmental factors or management factors.
- There are opportunities to manage both the temporal (between seasons) and spatial (within-field) variation in crop production.
- PA adoption starts when a farmer wants to apply a new level of knowledge to a production processes. It is not necessarily synonymous with buying a GPS unit and/or a yield monitor.
- There are various entry points into PA for farmers and not all of them involve a large initial capital outlay.
Take the quiz below to review the concepts covered in Module 1 - Introduction to Precision Agriculture
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