Precision agriculture: Concepts and simple approaches for managing spatial variability in soils and crops

Abstract

Agricultural fields are not uniform in nature. Precision agriculture or "Site Specific Crop Management" is a production technique that views the field as land divided into plots with uniform soil or plant properties. Agricultural inputs in seeds, fertilizers and herbicides can therefore be adjusted to correspond to the needs of each plot. Agricultural equipment used in Precision Agriculture must deliver the prescribed application rate at the time and at the predetermined position. These advanced technologies poses the problem of their adoption by users in developing countries. In addition, these technologies are not always available and are often associated with high costs and low profitability. In Morocco, to consider spatial variability in crop management, especially cereals and legumes, we propose a simple approach that begins with a sampling of the desired soil or plant property. Then, geostatistics are used to estimate the value of the property in the unsampled locations. The result is a map showing the production potential of each plot. First, we propose to group the plots into three classes (high, medium and low productivity). Then three input packages (sowing rate, fertilizer rate, etc.) will be applied to the different plots. This approach is straightforward and can be adopted by users without much difficulty. The main objective of this reflection is to recall the concepts of precision agriculture, to describe some technologies and approaches used in precision agriculture, and to propose simple approaches and practices to consider spatial variability and optimize the use of agricultural inputs to improve production systems profitability.

Keywords

• agriculture de précision
• intrants agricoles
• dose d’application
• variabilité spatiale
• optimization