Farmers have for many years studied their land and crops to optimize quality and yield. Over the last century, industrial development has introduced countless new technologies that enable farmers to cultivate more land in less time. The general optimisation has focused on cost reduction, where the core costs have been the consumption of time to cultivate and care for the soil and crops.
In order to maintain the competitiveness of Danish agriculture, it is crucial that we continue to develop and implement new technologies. In the next edition of precision agriculture, data utilisation plays a major role. The industry uses the term ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), which describes the possibilities of using new technologies, aligning the huge amounts of data from it and using advanced statistics to get new production-optimising solutions.
In agriculture, they want to intensify production by implementing new technologies to evaluate every square meter of the cultivated land on a farm, regardless of whether the farm has 100 hectares or 100,000 hectares. Sensors on fully automated drones in the air, on observation robots on the ground and from satellites will supplement sensors on agricultural machines, which with high precision and site-specific will provide information on e.g. soil status, crop growth and biological threats to crops. In the near future, this will enable a site-specific decision support system for the next generation of farmer to continue upgrading and improving cultivation practices, nutrient utilisation and increasing crop quality and yield.
