Precision Agriculture

Precision Agriculture

Rick Worthington
Rick Worthington
How familiar are you with the term Precision Agriculture?

It's a farming management concept. The goal of Precision Agriculture is to optimize returns while preserving all your resources at the same time. How you get there is the trick, and studies are currently being conducted in an attempt to optimize how it's done...and which crops are best suited.

More and more often - the eye in the sky has become a very important tool for those that employ the Precision Agriculture concept. Farmers are seeking greater insight into their crops using imagery, as we hear from Quinn Jackson, with Land View Inc.

""If we compare, like, for corn or for potato, for corn there is lots of measurements you can do on the vegetation and they are pretty linked to the yield, which is not always the case for potato."

"What you see over the soil is not always (representative of) a good relationship with what we will have in terms of tubers in the soil.""

And, he thinks, your drone could soon be the most efficient piece of equipment on your ranch.

""All of these tools, it depends on what you want to do with it."

"It can go from the very simple where, 'I just want to see a picture of my field,' to much more sophisticated where I want to use it to change my fertility."

"I want to use it to change my drainage. There's examples in the Netherlands; they're using it to decide where to fumigate."

There is more tech farmers are using, including high-definition soil mapping and variable rate irrigation.

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