Precision agriculture
Site-specific management (SSM) is the idea of doing the right thing, at the right place, at the right time. This idea is as old as agriculture, but during the mechanization of agriculture in the 20th century there was strong economic pressure to treat large fields with uniform agronomic practices. Precision farming provides a way to automate SSM using information technology, thereby making SSM practical in commercial agriculture. PA includes all those agricultural production practices that use information technology either to tailor input use to achieve desired outcomes, or to monitor those outcomes (e.g. variable rate application (VRA), yield monitors, remote sensing). Lowenberg-DeBoer and Swinton (1997) define SSM as the ‘‘electronic monitoring and control applied to data collection, information processing and decision support for the temporal and spatial allocation of inputs for crop production.’’ They highlight that the focus is on agronomic crops, but the arguments apply to horticultural crops and to the electronic tagging of livestock. Temporal SSM requires management of inputs based on information about the life cycles of agricultural crops, livestock or pests. This temporal information is often referred to as developmental stage (DS) information (Swinton, 1997). For instance, integrated pest management involves many cases of DS management practices, such as the use of pest scouting to determine the need and timing of pest control. DS management is also used in livestock management: bar-coding and other sensors are used to keep track of individual dairy cow milk production, food consumption, and health (Swinton, 1997).