Precision farming in South Africa

Abstract

Precision Farming is by far the most exciting new agricultural technology developed during the past decade, and although technology transfer is especially difficult in agriculture for a number of reasons, this technology has survived its initial stages of implementation. Historically field boundaries were often along natural soil boundaries, leading to small fields, which were treated homogenously. As agricultural machinery was developed and grew ever larger, fields were often combined to allow for more efficient cultivation. As result, fields with varying properties were created resulting in inefficiencies. Precision Farming was developed to overcome this problem. In this paper some results of initial research undertaken in South Africa under a variety of circumstances will be shown.