Farming has undergone a massive change in the last century.
Our forefathers grew crops on small fields and relied on mules instead of heavy machinery to plow the land. They walked their fields and knew how crops were growing in every section. That way, they could direct resources, such as manure, to places they thought needed it the most.
In recent decades, technological advancements have brought bigger machinery, resulting in larger fields and much larger farms. But they’ve also made it harder for growers to address areas within their fields that might need more targeted attention. With slim profit margins and steep foreign competition, American farmers need every advantage they can get. Precision agriculture empowers them with information to make daily and long-term strategic decisions.
Precision agriculture uses sensors, GPS, artificial intelligence, and other technologies to help farmers know exactly what’s happening in every corner of their land. These tools lead to maps showing each area’s yield and the underlying yield potential as well as what resources were invested in growing the crop. This information can be synthesized to create maps showing the profitability of different areas of the field. The profitability maps help growers decide how to distribute fertilizer, seed, irrigation, and other inputs to maximize efficiency and profitability. For example, my research focuses on precision irrigation, answering the question: How do we apply the right amount of water in the right place at the right time?
Precision agriculture is a deeply interdisciplinary undertaking drawing from agronomy, animal science, engineering, entomology, plant pathology, and economics, to name a few. As researchers, it’s easy for us to work as individuals to solve a particular task. But when we work together to look at problems from different perspectives, we come up with optimal solutions for even bigger challenges.
The University of Georgia has been a leader in precision agriculture for three decades. For most of this time, the effort was led by a dedicated team at UGA’s South Georgia campus in Tifton. In 2022,UGA launched the Institute of Integrative Precision Agriculture to leverage our entire university’s faculty expertise and industry ties to advance this field. We’ve invested in faculty hires and facility development to build our capacity. In addition to applying precision agriculture to traditional crops like cotton, corn, and peanuts, we now apply these principles to poultry, livestock, forestry, and specialty crops like blueberries.
As the institute’s director, I am proud of our status as an international leader in precision agriculture, and I firmly believe in our mission. Ultimately, helping farmers improve their efficiency yields good-paying jobs in rural areas, sustains the agricultural industry, and feeds a growing global population.
