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Remote Sensing Tools Can Add Precision
Precision agriculture, or precision farming as it is sometimes called, is a management strategy that employs detailed, site-specific information to precisely manage production inputs. Precision agriculture requires information about soil properties, landscape, elevation, and how these characteristics affect plant growth and crop progress throughout the field each season. Yield monitors provide a method to determine crop production in one part of the field, compared with another part.
However, by harvest time any opportunity to manage the crop is gone. Timely, inexpensive and accurate information is therefore important for the success of precision agriculture on individual farms.
Remote sensing is a method of collecting information about a field from a distance. There are many different types of sensors being used in agriculture.The most
common sensors measure light reflected from the field. Of
these, the easiest to use is a camera with color, or color-infrared, film. Color film provides information based on
light reflected from the blue, green, and red spectrum.
Color infrared film, when used with a yellow lens filter on
the camera, provides a picture based on the green, red, and
near-infrared spectrum...
Author : Harold Kaufman, Terry Wheeler, Peter Dotray and Wayne Keeling, Texas A&M University Agricultural Research & Extension Center. |
Precision Agriculture : Remote Sensing and Ground Truthing
Remote sensing for agriculture can be defined simply as “observing a field or crop without touching it”. Although remote sensing can be as simple as a “windshield survey” of a field from a truck at 55 mph, the history of modern remote sensing began when black-and-white photographs of the landscape were first taken from the air. The first organized effort to acquire aerial photographs appeared in the late 1930s by the Department of the Army. Eventually the Agriculture Stabilization and Conservation Service adopted the technology and began collecting indexed photographs of the landscape for agricultural purposes. Many of these photographs are still available through the Farm Service Agency. Remote sensing, today, incorporates new technologies that provide increasingly efficient, complete, accurate, and timely information. These new technologies, together with historical photographs, provide the informational basis for a practical management tool for site-specific management of crops.
Remote sensing technologies provide a diagnostic tool that has at least two important functions as well as many other uses in site-specific management of crops. Remote sensing can be used to measure reflectance of light energy from the crop canopy, which may be useful in detecting plant stress while there is still time to correct the problem. The pictures or maps created with remote sensing also provide a quick method for estimating the extent of an important crop characteristic or the location of areas of a field that appear to have similar characteristics. These images or maps are useful in developing scouting plans for direct examination of the detected soil or plant conditions and in developing site-specific treatment plans...
Author : William W. Casady (Department of Biology and Agriculture Engineering), Harlan L. Palm (Department of Agronomy), MU Extension , University of Missouri - Colombia.
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