Managing the spatial variability of soil fertility parameters is one of the oldest and still existing significant obstacles towards sustainable land use in agriculture. Local Resource Management (LRM) is a concept to address the spatial variability of soils by variable inputs and operations in agricultural practice. Precision Agriculture (PA) is the technological framework for implementing LRM on a practical level. With the availability of satellite aided positioning and navigation (GPS) and sheer unlimited data processing and storage capacities at the beginning of the 1990s it seemed that PA would rapidly change the way of agricultural production. However, 10 years later PA is still a freak technology in agriculture, whereas in industrial and service sectors the same technologies have boosted development and profits. The low economic returns can be blamed as the key obstacles for the development of PA. This is because PA has been first and is still predominately applied to fertilisers and to a much smaller extent to pesticides. But their share in the total costs of production are constantly declining, and by this also the margins to finance even the basic costs of PA technology. Substantial benefits from managing the spatial variability of soils can only be expected if implementation costs or labour costs for PA can be reduced. Reducing investment costs by increasing the efficiency of agricultural inputs has been proved on large scale farming in countries in the third world, but is not applicable for most of the scenarios in developed countries. With machinery efficiency running on top in agriculture of developed countries large areas can be maintained only by a single person. Here, the only source for financing implementation and variable costs are the labour costs of the 'last man'. If this 'last man' will be replaced by smart navigation systems the saving of labour expenses and increases in machinery efficiency (e.g. by night operations) will gain substantial profits. On top of that 'classical' PA applications, such as variable rate fertiliser and pesticide applications, would provide well appreciated added values improving the overall benefit of the system.
展开▼
