Abstract
<p class="Abstract">Precision agriculture (PA) offers the opportunity for farmers to improve both efficiency in managing resources and optimisation of process inputs, thus increasing their whole farm’s profitability. Despite these well-known benefits, the adoption of PA technologies (PATs) is still challenging due to socio-economic barriers and unique characteristics of the farms: cropping systems, technical developments, field sizes and farm scale. The economic aspect is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects to consider before adopting PATs. In most of the cases, farmers are reluctant to introduce precision farming systems since the costs and uncertainty about the profitability and advantages need to be addressed. This study aims to explore how PATs could affect the profitability of a representative Italian farm specialising in the production of cereals, making this a case study. In detail, an economic analysis was applied to determine the profitability of the farm, which showed that the adoption of PAT’s increased the yield of durum and soft wheat and significantly reduced the cost of mechanical operations and technical means. Therefore, the potential gains from the adoption of PATs challenges policymakers to design targeted interventions which could encourage their uptake. This paper is an extended version of the original contribution presented to the 2019 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Agriculture and Forestry (MetroAgriFor) in Portici, Italy.</p>
Highlights
As a means of producing on-site data to guide decisionmaking, precision agriculture (PA) is a whole-farm management approach that allows for managing crops growth for better yield and quality through measuring physical parameters and collecting data [1]
Comparing the pre-adoption and post-adoption period of PA technologies (PATs), the main empirical evidence is relating to two main issues:
The case study in this work contributes to the body of research aimed at identifying important points of reference for cost-effectiveness and efficiency in PA-derived production inputs
Summary
As a means of producing on-site data to guide decisionmaking, precision agriculture (PA) is a whole-farm management approach that allows for managing crops growth for better yield and quality through measuring physical parameters and collecting data [1]. PA technologies (PATs) are all those innovations that incorporate recent advances in modern agriculture, providing evidence for lower production costs, increased farming efficiency and reduced impacts. Accuracy and precision are two relevant factors to consider when taking data measurements. They both reflect how close a measurement is to an actual value, but accuracy refers to how close a measurement is to a known or accepted value, while precision reflects how reproducible measurements are
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