Precision Agriculture: Where do We Stand? A Review of the Adoption of Precision Agriculture Technologies on Field Crops Farms in Developed Countries

Abstract

Precision agriculture is a management concept, which relies on intensive data collection and data processing for guiding targeted actions that improve the efficiency, productivity, and sustainability of agricultural operations. Several studies have assessed the adoption rate of precision agriculture technologies at regional or national scale, but the literature lacks global evaluations of the development of precision agriculture. For this paper, a review of 17 papers was conducted to provide an evaluation of the adoption rate of precision agriculture technologies on field crops farms in developed countries. This review shows a fast development of Global Navigation Satellite System-based technologies (such as guidance system and automatic section control), and yield monitor on combine harvesters, with a rate of adoption ranging from 60 to 80% in 2016. The adoption rate of these technologies is higher for North American farms than for European farms, with an average rate of adoption 17% higher in North America than in Europe. The three technologies closely correlated with variable rate application (soil mapping, variate rate fertilizing, and variable rate seeding) have seen a slower pace of growth, with only a third of the field crops farms of developed countries using automated methods of managing the spatial crop variability and spatial soil variability within a field. Three hypotheses to explain this difference are discussed: successive adoption of technologies, reject of complex technologies and preference for technologies improving working conditions.