ABSTRACT

Recent technological advances in production agriculture, such as yield monitoring, information management, and geographical information systems, have offered U.S. producers a new way of farming in the information age-precision farming. Precision farming can help producers realize higher efciency and better protability through managing their production, by addressing special needs in small grids of a eld rather than the entire eld (Zhang et al., 2002). For example, supported by precision technologies, producers are now capable of fertilizing grids at different rates, to maximize the yield with minimal fertilizer consumption. However, there are still some bottlenecks limiting the benet to producers from precision agriculture technologies, and one of them is providing operators with appropriate task instructions

3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 41 3.2 Denition of Agricultural Infotronic Systems ................................................ 42 3.3 Electronic Hardware ....................................................................................... 43

3.3.1 Overview ............................................................................................. 43 3.3.2 Data Collecting Elements ................................................................... 43 3.3.3 Data Computing Elements ..................................................................46 3.3.4 Data Transmitting Elements ............................................................... 47

3.4 Data Management Software ........................................................................... 49 3.4.1 Overview ............................................................................................. 49 3.4.2 Data Collection ...................................................................................50 3.4.3 Data Integration .................................................................................. 51 3.4.4 Data Mining ........................................................................................ 52 3.4.5 Data Visualization .............................................................................. 53

3.5 Precision Farming Services ............................................................................54 3.5.1 Overview .............................................................................................54 3.5.2 Examples of Products and Services ....................................................54 3.5.3 Information Management Tools ......................................................... 55

3.6 System Integration and Applications .............................................................. 55 3.7 Summary ........................................................................................................ 57 References ................................................................................................................ 57

at the time they are needed. For example, it is critical for the operator of a fertilizer applicator to know “how much” nitrogen is to be applied at a specic location in a eld, in order to perform effective variable-rate fertilization. Such location-specic “how much” information directly usable by operators is an example of necessary task instructions for precision farming operations.