Top 5 precision agriculture technologies
The Precision Agriculture marketplace is dedicated to making farm life more efficient.
They offer numerous products from hardware to software that can save farmers time, energy, and money. This article features a list of their most tech-savvy products geared at helping farmers.
Precision seeding
Variable rate seeding can take some of a headache out of planting seeds in inconsistent terrain. Using this increasingly popular technology can be a true benefit to agriculturists who have farmland with soil that is significantly nonuniform.
Midwest farmers often find variable rate seeding to make an extreme difference in their overall produce, as their soil tends to be much more variable than eastern farmland.
Data storage
Getting the information on the farm’s production is critical; not only must that data be analyzed, it needs to be properly stored.
If corn production has a higher than ever yield after using a new fertilizer, agriculturists will want to review the data to see if to see if the fertilizer or another factor could have influenced the outcome.
This can’t be done if the records are unable to be found. It’s important that agriculturists be able to access their findings easily when they need it.
New technology is working towards making sure data is analyzed and saved in the proper format, so researchers can find what they need when they need it.
Smart devices
The days of farmers only needing a good work ethic and green thumb are over. With so much competition, farmers must use the latest technology to manage their operations and sustain profitability.
New innovations are allowing farmers to hook up devices to their tractor’s CAN-BUS system and be able to review all of its components in an instant. Instead of farmer’s wasting time on trying to figure what is wrong when their equipment is not performing optimally, they can simply plug in their smart device and see exactly what is causing the problem.
This is extremely favorable, considering otherwise farmers would have to pay a mechanic just for their time hunting for the root of the problem. By using this system, agriculturists can simply tell the mechanic what the problem is, so he can fix it right away and they can get back to farming.
Drones
Drones are now being used in the farming industry very frequently. Pilots can maneuver their unmanned aerial vehicles through the air to capture footage of everything happening on the farm.
The drones can scan and observe animals and crops faster than humans can on foot. If cows are not eating their usual fill and look unhealthy, the drone can provide its findings so that farmers will know to send out a veterinarian to check out the problem.
If the vegetables they are growing are infested with insects, the data collected by the drones can make farmers aware of the issue so they can resolve it before it’s too late. Drones can also keep an eye on equipment. Things like one sprinkler out of two hundred not functioning properly can be easy to miss by the human eye.
A pilot flying a drone at a reasonable speed is more likely to notice the malfunction if he is viewing the field from an aerial perspective. If something like this were to go unnoticed, the plants around that particular sprinkler could wither; an attentive UAV pilot can keep that from happening. The uses for UAVs in agriculture are numerous.
Remote imaging
Remote Imaging relates to the real-time images provided by both satellites and drones. Scientists are working diligently to improve the quality of instant video and photo surveillance made possible by satellites.
It’s not all about the images themselves either, innovative software is being developed to help agriculturists better interpret the data within an image.
Precision Agriculture is focused on solving problems farmers can face in day-to-day work as well as in special cases. Equipment and operations that are good they aim to make better through advanced technology. As seen in this article, 5 of the most pertinent advances in their products relate to data.
Since science is the key to bolstering efficiency and managing profitability, farmers can bet there will be even greater intelligent products from Precision Agriculture to come.
