GEOmedia (Jan 2018)
Agricoltura di precisione: l’impegno di ALPHA Consult in Europa e Africa
Abstract
Precision agriculture is the application of different technologies and solutions aimed to manage the variability of agricultural production, in order to improve crop yield and reduce environmental impact, by also increasing resilience to climate change. All in all, these technologies are also key enabling elements of the foreshadowed autonomous driving concept realized in the agricultural domain, applied for tractors and spraying drones, the documentation of assets and tasks, raising preparedness for disaster relief, etc. In recent years, a number of technologies have been developed leveraging satellite positioning systems (e.g. Galileo and EGNOS), geographic information systems (GIS), earth observation services (e.g. Copernicus), UAVs and/or IoT sensors. In general, the technology is still far form level 5 automatization of driving (on the 0-5 ADAS scale), but applications like automatic steering, tractor guidance, geofencing, livestock tracking and asset management/documentation are already quite widespread and their adoption is expected to grow in the next future. Nevertheless, the uptake of such sophisticated technologies necessarily entails a number of costs. In this sense, the benefits of precision agriculture must be coherent with the expenditure incurred by farmers in introducing them. In this context, throughout different projects, ALPHA Consult's work and expertise appears crucial to investigate such coherence for the major players in the agricultural sector, in particular in Europe and Africa.
