ABSTRACT

For more than ten years, precision agriculture has gained an increasing profile in the agricultural community. Although many farmers are yet to practice any part of this new concept, considerable research effort has been expended, advisors are eager to learn, and agricultural and other engineering companies are producing equipment of increasing sophistication to enable the practice of precision agriculture. The basis of precision agriculture-the spatial and temporal variability in soil and crop factors within a field-has been appreciated for centuries.1 In past centuries, the much smaller size of fields and their delineation by natural boundaries, such as water courses and change of soil type, may have enabled farmers to vary treatment manually. However, with the enlargement of fields, intensive production and mechanization in the latter half of the past century, it was not possible to take account of within-field spatial variability without significant developments in technology. Figure 2.1 shows a 60 ha area in Denmark which was farmed as 22 fields in 1775, 5 fields in 1875, and 1 field in 1995.