Tools of precision agriculture: A review

Abstract

Today’s polluted environment and over exploited natural resource, demand for immediate precautionary steps for sustainability of the earth. Agriculture also hugely contributes to such devastated condition. Precision agriculture technology is capable of performing site specific managements by delineating management zones. It helps achieve yield optimization, cost minimization and benefit maximization through GIS, GPS, remote sensing data acquisition, decision support system, sensor-controlled automatization, variable rate technology (VRT) and many other. For performing any management practice, the components work in concord. While GPS, remote sensors can provide location specific parameter values, GIS is able to create georeferenced wholesome map of a field; and controlled rate of chemical application is done through VRT via decision support systems. However, there are some of the factors which limits its adoption by the grower community over the world. But efforts are being made to improve adoption trend of precision-agriculture technologies; and make agriculture a sustainable practice.