Precision Agriculture farming techniques

a. Evaluation of Soil Properties by Sensor Measurements

• There are a range of sensors available used to measure and calculate the parameters of an agricultural field, namely the soil sensors, which can save labor and be a useful management tool, often providing more timely results, if they are accurate and the data are correctly interpreted
• Soil electrical conductivity (ECa) sensors measure the soil solute concentration while assessing the soil salinity hazard
• Mobile measurements of ECa have become widely used to map soil variability. The greatest potential use of ECa scanning is in the survey of spatial soil variability and delineating potential site-specific management zones.
• This, in turn, would allow for better resource allocation and long-term management planning
• Soil water content sensors such as frequency domain reflectometry (FDR) or time domain reflectometry (TDR) sensors measure the amount of water (volume or mass) contained in a unit volume or mass of soil by using electrodes

b. Precision Seeding

• Precision seeding has become the main feature and developing direction of modern seeding technologies in recent years.
• Precision seeding can save seeds and effectively control the sowing depth, densities, or distance.
• According to statistics, the output of precision seeding increases by 10–30% compared with that of the conventional drill
• Recent research has been carried out in order to make the sowing process more precise and efficient.
• One of the most important aspects to achieve the consistent emergence of the crop desired is the use of a uniform seeding depth.
• Consistent crop emergence influences final crop yields, as the seedling growth process affects the variability of crop biomass
• Seeding using different types of machine considering depth, size of seeds and etc

c. Smart Irrigation Systems

• Precision irrigation allows farmers to apply a precise amount of water to crops at precise times
• These technologies use the sensors’ data of the recent past and the weather forecasted data for the prediction of soil moisture for upcoming days.
• Furthermore, the prediction approach is integrated into a cost-effective standalone system prototype as it is based on open-source technologies.
• The auto mode makes it a smart system and it can be further customized for application specific scenarios.

d. Smart Fertilization system

• As an important part of precision agriculture, variable rate technology (VRT) offers an effective way to protect the environment and increase economic benefit while farming with site-specific fertilizer inputs.
• The variable-rate fertilizer control system applied to a UAV-based granular fertilizer spreader for automatically adjusting the fertilizer application rate based on a prescription map
• From another aspect, robots are perfectly suited to be used in agricultural operations, particularly in the spraying of fertilizer, which can carry large storage reservoirs, be operated safely and autonomously, and be deployed at a fraction of the costs compared to the traditional methods