How Farmers Can be More Precise in the Field

How precision tools can help farmers produce more food on existing farmland.

By
Jynwaye Foo
June 23, 2020

 


C+S 2020 students are blogging about topics that interest them for Applications in Climate and Society, a core spring class.


Traditional farming is ripe for an upgrade. With the global demand for food expected to increase anywhere between 59 percent to 98 percent over the next 30 years, the burden to produce enough food to feed the world population falls most heavily on farmers. In the U.S., we are running out of productive farmland. That means farmers must make do with existing farmland to produce more food. More farmers are achieving that by integrating digital tools in farming management, a process known as precision agriculture.

Are you Corn-fused about precision agriculture?

Precision agriculture is a suite of modern farming practices that use new technologies to increase production while lowering the usual levels of inputs needed to grow crops. These inputs include land, water, fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides. With precision agriculture, farmers use less to grow more.

The Dirt on GPS

We use GPS to navigate anytime we open the maps app on our phones. But that same tool could now help farmers. By driving a tractor around the field with an in-vehicle GPS receiver, farmers can map field boundaries and create personalized farm maps. This helps them identify precise acreage of available croplands, road and irrigation system locations, and distances between points of interest. This allows farmers to plant crops in more efficient patterns and navigate fields with more precision.

More importantly, with GPS, farmers can navigate to specific locations in their fields to acquire soil and plant samples for further analysis. By evaluating soil variability for instance, farmers will know how much water a specific crop acreage can hold and in turn, adjust the level of water input to the available water capacity of the soil, optimizing resources and maximizing output as a result.

Farmers traditionally use similar levels of inputs on all crops. This practice not only costs farmers time and resources, it also causes agricultural runoff that harms the environment. Agricultural runoff contains toxic chemicals from fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides that are detrimental to aquatic life and the surrounding environment. Farmers armed with data on their soil and crops however, could fine tune the levels of agricultural chemical inputs according to each crop’s needs, instead of guesstimating like they would in traditional farming. That helps save time, money and the environment.

Graphic from USDA explaining the cost of precision farming tools

Rooting for Drones

Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones can be used to help with pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer application in precision agriculture. Drones can also access parts of the field that tractors cannot. This helps reduce farm labor as farmers no longer need to physically apply chemicals on their crops using a manual backpack-type sprayer. Farmers can carry out the strenuous task of spraying in half the time with a drone controller in their hands, all from the comfort of their couch.

It’s About Thyme

Precision agriculture is not only limited to GPS systems and drones, but a peek into the two technologies show the potential of this farming management method. As a result of this time efficient, cost efficient and labor efficient strategy, farmers can feed more people, all while reducing the environmental impact of agriculture (the number one leading perpetrator of climate change).

While investing in drones and GPS-equipped machinery can be expensive, the benefits of long-term savings and environmental breakthroughs outweigh the upfront cost, making it a proposition for farmers with the means to consider. As precision agriculture enters the mainstream, costs will likely come down, making it more accessible to farmers in the country. Currently, around 250,000 small corn farms in the U.S. have adopted some form of precision agriculture practice. This number will only continue to grow.

Graph representing how long it takes fro precision farming methods to pay for themselve.