ABSTRACT
Farmers in the Western Australian wheatbelt face a number of serious threats to both their rural lifestyle and their agricultural businesses. These include:
PRECISION AGRICULTURE
Agriculture has seen several major changes which have been stimulated by new technol ogy. These include the introduction of new genetic material, cultivation techniques or agrochemicals (Pierce and Nowak, 1999). Information technology, which is a more recent
introduction, has been moderately slow to penetrate (Robert, 1999) with many farmers still lacking the capability to record and analyze data on basic attributes such as produc tivity, returns or product quality. An obvious reason for this is that such information has, until recently, been difficult to capture — how could a farmer possibly acquire it as easily as a manager of a manufacturing plant? This situation has improved dramatically over the past decade with the introduction of precision agriculture technology, which introduces a vastly expanded capability to measure and control in the field. It includes:
1) yield monitoring and mapping equipment, linked to real-time differential GPS, for near continuous recording of value and location for a range of attributes;
2) variable rate technology (VRT), which enables near continuous, instantaneous control of variable inputs such as fertilizer, spray, seed or irrigation water;
3) satellite, airborne and ground-based remote sensing, to detect spatial variations of the crop, soil or underlying geology;
4) on-the-go sensors to record additional crop or soil attributes during routine manage ment operations;
5) low cost GIS to handle the range of spatial information.
