ABSTRACT
Australia presents an interesting case study in the rate and form of adoption of precision agriculture (PA). In terms of the availability of labor and capital to agriculture, it ranks close to the United States as a potential fast adopter of technology. In Australia, labor resources are sparse but sufficient capital is available, and so a relatively rapid adoption of labor-substituting management technology might be expected. However, adoption has been patchy, and has followed a different path to that expected when PA technology first appeared in the early 1990s. As with other complex technologies, adoption has occurred as “steps” in which the processes of acquiring the technology then learning how to use it have overlapped each other. Although we remain at an early stage of development in Australia, this has occurred on a fairly broad front, with several industries taking different parts of the technology and applying them to problems peculiar to each situation.
