ABSTRACT
Conventional agriculture has served humankind well. However, the limitations of conventional agricultural practices are becoming increasingly evident as the world’s food producers push production to the limit with finite resources and the public closely scrutinizes the environmental ramifications of producers’ efforts. Because conventional agriculture disregards the spatial and temporal complexity of the interacting factors that affect crop yield and focuses on productivity, it will not be able to meet the global economic, environmental and limited-resource challenges of the future. Barring any new technological breakthroughs, precision agriculture, or more specifically, site-specific crop management, is the next logical step to meet world food demands using state-of-the-art scientific knowledge and technology that can address these spatial and temporal complexities.
