Produce more with less environmental impact The AEM study on the environmental benefits of precision agriculture revealed that farmers using precision technology experienced a 4% increase in agricultural production, a 7% increase in the efficiency of fertilizer placement, a 9% reduction in the use of herbicides and pesticides and a 6% reduction in the use of fossil fuels. The agricultural industry has been radically transformed over the past 50 years. Advances in machinery have expanded the scale, speed and productivity of agricultural equipment, leading to more efficient cultivation of more land. Seeds, irrigation and fertilizers have also improved tremendously, helping farmers to increase yields.
Now, agriculture is in the early days of another revolution, in which data and connectivity meet. Artificial intelligence, analytics, connected sensors and other emerging technologies could further increase yields, improve the efficiency of water and other inputs, and promote sustainability and resilience in crops and livestock. Precision agriculture (PA) is the science that improves crop yields and helps make management decisions using high-tech sensors and analysis tools. PA is a new concept adopted around the world to increase production, reduce working time and ensure the effective management of fertilizers and irrigation processes.
It uses a large amount of data and information to improve the use of agricultural resources, yields and crop quality (Mulla, 201.PA). It is an advanced innovation and management strategy optimized at the field level that is used in agriculture and that aims to improve the productivity of resources in agricultural fields. Therefore, PA is a new advanced method in which farmers provide optimized inputs, such as water and fertilizers, to improve productivity, quality and yield (Gebbers and Adamchuk, 20). It requires an enormous amount of information about the state or health of the crop during the growing season with high spatial resolution.
Regardless of the data source, PA's most important objective is to support farmers in managing their businesses. This support is provided in a variety of ways, but the end result is often a decrease in the resources needed (Fig. Regenerative agriculture Traditional agricultural methods with intensive tillage have left the soil vulnerable to erosion caused by wind and rain. Regenerative agriculture proposes a series of practices to “regenerate the soil”.
Among them is “zero tillage”, which recommends little or very light tillage. One problem for producers who implement regenerative agriculture is the impact on weeds; tillage was an effective method of pre-emergency control. Without that, the producer must rely on a strong pre-emergency application of an herbicide (called “burning”, since it also eliminates the remains of the last harvest). Basically, it's about changing one environmental issue for another.
From the creation of the plow to precision agricultural equipment powered by the global positioning system (GPS), humans have developed new ways to make agriculture more efficient and grow more food.
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