Pantnagar Journal of Research

Abstract

Precision agriculture (PA) refers to the management of spatial and temporal variability of the fields using mechatronics. Horticultural commodity production and its quality are effected by many factors like proper planting, weeding and interculture, irrigation, attack of insects/pests and harvesting techniques. Precision agriculture is a pro-active approach that reduces some of the risks from these variables common to agriculture and horticulture. In addition, it lowers the environmental hazards in comparison to conventional systems. Precision agriculture precisely establishes various operations, such as tillage, sowing/planting, irrigation, application of fertilizer, weeding operation, disease detection, pesticide spraying, harvesting etc., and thus, turns traditional extensive production to intensive production according to space variable data. Various precision agriculture techniques such as RTK-GPS enabled seed planters or transplanters for geospatial mapping of row-crop plant/transplant, wireless sensor network (WSN) enabled crop stress monitoring systems, site-specific variable rate irrigation, robotic control systems for real time weed detection and control, microcontroller based variable rate herbicide/pesticide application systems, automated harvesting and yield monitoring systems not only perform various operations in horticultural crops precisely, but in a cost effective way by saving various agricultural inputs with lower human intervention.PA brings more or at least similar profit as compared to conventional practices, however, it needs to be supported and managed by government and private sectors to volunteer in its initial costs.