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Precision farming, components, working technology, advantages and disadvantages, scope in rural India

Every year, millions of liters of water, tonnes of fertilizers, and pesticides use in agriculture. Every farmer knows the approximate figure for using the amount of these. But practically, people use an unnecessary amount of the components of agriculture. This is not good for sustainable agriculture. 

Precision farming helps to overcome the problem and reduce the wastage of water, fertilizers, and pesticides and save money and time.

Let's discuss how it works.

Precision farming and technology 

Let's start from starting. Let's understand the working of precision farming and then move on to the technology use in precision farming. 

What is precision farming?

Precision farming is a modern agriculture technique that helps to improve the overall productivity of crops by making precise data and predictions regarding soil needs, plant growth, and weather.

Working of precision farming

Precision farming collects the sample data of soil and generalizes it by mapping soil, land, and making a chart of the requirements of soil and crop precisely.

Precision farming

It is not a simple model. There are various sections of working precision farming. 

Following are some points that tell us about the working purpose of precision farming-

  • Precision farming reduces the overall production cost. 
  • This method helps to improve and increase the total crop yield.
  • It helps to take better and urgent decisions for crop agriculture.
  • It reduces the wastage of water, fertilizers, and pesticides and uses a precise amount of these.

Components of precision farming

There are mainly three components in precision farming. All of them work as a complementary to another. 

Collection of data

First of all, after collecting a sample, forensic testing is necessary. After testing, we collect the data related to efficiency and requirements.

Efficiency of technology

After making a chart of collected data, most of your work will be done by technology. So the technology must be accurate and efficient. This takes us further for improvement in crop agriculture.

Management of problems and requirements

In this component of precision farming, technology is implemented in crop agriculture. This technology uses the accurate amount of requirements for crops like irrigation water, fertilizers, and pesticides, and reduces the unnecessary waste of these. 

This technology checks the growth period and growth stages regularly with the help of modern techniques accurately. 

Technology use in Precision farming

Global Information System(GIS)

In precision farming, climate, soil type, and temperature variations reading are important. the GIS system is a modern technology that helps to find these terms.

Global Positioning System(GPS)

GPS systems map a particular measurement of land and collect the data for precision farming.

Remote Sensing 

Remote sensing techniques collect and provide data regarding soil moisture, humidity, crop affected, and non-affected areas. 

Although there are different machines and tools that collect the data they work on the command of remote sensing.

Advantages and disadvantages of precision farming

Advantages of Precision farming

  • In the precision farming model, a regular checkup of crop plants one by one and data management figure out all the possible growth-related problems.
  • It is faster, easier, and highly accurate to improve the quality and quantity of crops. 
  • It is easy to do soil mapping and soil analysis in precision farming.
  • Precision farming is a modern agriculture method to avoid the waste of irrigation water, fertilizers, and pesticides. You can use a precise amount of requirements by data management.
  • In precision farming, it is easy to make a chart to generalize and resolve a problem.
  • In the least resources areas, precision farming is very impactful. For example, desserts can be very effective.  

Disadvantages of Precision farming

  • Precision farming infrastructure is too costly. It asks for a huge capital and is currently not possible everywhere.
  • Precision farming can't implement in rural areas because of multiple reasons like land differences, ownerships, and infrastructure. Also, rural farmers don't value the quick change in agriculture techniques.
  • Precision farming is not a free-hand agriculture method. It means you need a proper team or person to operate and read daily data of requirements, problems, and their solutions.
  • There is no subsidy on precision farming that government provides to farmers. 

Why precision farming is too far from Indian rural farmers?

There is a huge lack of encouragement and advertisement for precision farming. 

But still, following are fundamental reasons why rural farmers can't adopt precision farming in upcoming years.

Absence of modern infrastructure

In Indian rural areas, the current infrastructure is too far from modern techniques adaptation. Even the rural agriculture infrastructure is too behind urban agriculture which is not ideal for the adaptation of modern farming techniques either.

One another major problem is that the traditional farmers can't switch their traditional farming techniques so quickly to modern agriculture. Although the process of change can slow down still it will take so much time to adapt to new highly scientific techniques in agriculture.

Land ownership

In the list of overall Indian farmers, more than 80% of farmers are poor farmers. In this list of poor farmers, a big number of farmers don't have their land, or their lands are mortgage because of debt and less income. The dependency of poor farmers on seasonal crops is their helplessness. 

In these conditions, how can rural farmers consider a high-budget precision farming system? Even if they agree on the understanding of precision farming, they don't have enough capital to invest in precision agriculture practice.  

Differences in land scale

In rural areas, there are differences among farmers on the land scale. Rich farmers have huge agricultural lands and small farmers own small portions of agricultural lands.

These differences create more distance between poor rural farmers and modern agriculture techniques like precision farming.

Although rich rural farmers have bigger lands they don't have such infrastructure and understanding of modern technology of precision farming. 

Management of data in villages

For an instant, let us consider that precision farming can implement in rural areas. In this case, rural farmers or owners need a proper team to manage the regular data and management. This team keeps its eyes on every possible situation either good or bad related to the crop. 

Practically, it is possible only in a limited number of farmers if you convince them strongly. But most of the rich farmers who have capital in rural areas, prefer regular and traditional ways of crop production and management. Neither poor farmers can handle fast change nor the rich rural farmers can handle it. So in rural areas, it is very hard to implement precision farming.

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