Conventional farming

• Although it is well known that soil is spatially heterogeneous, conventional farming currently treats a field uniformly with respect to the application of fertilizer, planting density, pesticides, soil amendments, irrigation water and other inputs, which ignores the naturally inherent variation in soil and crop conditions between and within fields.
• Conventional agriculture, therefore, inherently under or over applies inputs such as irrigation water, fertilizer, pesticides and soil amendments in some parts of fields.
• Failure to address within-field temporal and spatial variation in edaphic properties, as well as variation in anthropogenic, biological, meteorological and topographical factors that affect crop yield, has detrimental effects on economic benefits because of reduced yield in certain areas of a field and on the environment because of over-applications of agrochemicals and water, which is a waste of finite resources.
• This costs the producer and the public money, depletes finite resources and degrades soil, surface-water and groundwater resources