Why Is Precision Agriculture Important?

By American Farm Bureau Federation

When agriculture began at the end of the Stone Age, the world had approximately 5 million people to feed, and few, if any, farmers were feeding people beyond their extended family, writes Bernt Nelson at the American Farm Bureau Federation. Farmers today use technology to plant and harvest mile-long fields with equipment guided by satellites for sub-inch accuracy, allowing them to feed nearly 8 billion people across the world with fewer resources than ever before.

The term “precision agriculture” means managing, tracking or enhancing crop or livestock production inputs, including seed, feed, fertilizer, chemicals, water and time, at a heightened level of accuracy to improve efficiencies and commodity quality and yield, while positively impacting environmental stewardship.

To understand advancements in precision agriculture technology, we have to start at the beginning when precision agriculture wasn’t yet guided by GPS. Dr. Pierre Robert, sometimes referred to as “the father of precision agriculture,” conducted some of the earliest research on soil variability. In 1983, Dr. Robert was the first to research variable rate fertilizer spreading, which acknowledges that different areas of a field have different crop yields and thus have different nutrient requirements to obtain optimal yields. This understanding eventually led to the variable rate field management systems that farmers use today. According to a publication by USDA’s Economic Research Service, variable rate technology is used to plant between 5-25% of total U.S. planted acreage for winter wheat, cotton, sorghum and rice.

Through much of the 1990s, data was gearing up to become the new crop of the 21st century. Now farmers just needed a method to gather information more efficiently. The first yield monitor, created in 1992, did just that. Yield monitors allowed farmers to record observable changes in crop yields throughout an entire field. This data could be paired with grid sampling, taking soil samples from grid points mapped out on a field, to create a map of input adjustments needed to improve yields.