USDA’s Cooperative Extension Service has a good summary of a workshop held earlier this year on “Engineering Solutions for Specialty Crop Challenges.” The workshop provided a forum for special crop industries to engage the science and technology community. Industry representatives voiced their concerns with regard to productivity, production efficiency, post-harvest processing, and environmental quality. In response, the research community offered … Read More
Mapping Prairie Grass
Here’s another use for aerial imagery – helping ranchers decide how many cows they can support per acre, as well as how much carbon rangeland plants store. A study by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the University of North Dakota lays a foundation for eventually allowing ranchers to get Web-based information on the quality and quantity of forage plants … Read More
Precision Agriculture Being Developed in Japan
This past week I’ve been attending an International Federation of Agricultural Journalists Congress in Japan. On one of our stops we saw precision agriculture on display in a rice paddy! This is in development now at the Furukawa Agricultural Research Station. I interviewed Yoshisada Nogasaka, Research Team for Farm Machinery and Systems for NARC, the National Agricultural Research Center. He’s … Read More
Satellite Citrus Research
The Florida citrus industry is being threatened by diseases such as canker and greening that could have a severe impact on production in the future. The Florida Department of Citrus has been working with NASA for almost three years now to determine how satellite technology can help the state’s citrus industry track grove acreage and tree numbers, and eventually spot … Read More
Precision Citrus Counting
Researchers at the University of Florida are developing an electronic system to “see” and count citrus fruit, a concept called machine vision. It could be commercially available by the end of the decade. According to news from UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, the system includes a Global Positioning System receiver and notes the position of each tree with … Read More
Precision Update: Midwest Adoption
This spring, CropLife® magazine and Purdue University’s Center for Food and Agricultural Business conducted a survey of crop input dealers for the 12th consecutive year to see which precision technologies were being used by dealers, what type of precision services they were expecting to offer in the future, and how precision farming customers were impacting their businesses. As in previous … Read More
Farmers Continue to Embrace Technology
A report from the University of Kentucky asserts that growers are finding recent precision ag technology advancements are highly beneficial to their operations. “We’re really at an exciting time with this technology,” said Ben Koostra, an engineer associate with the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture. “What we’ve seen is in the past five or six years, the very early … Read More
USDA Studying Precision Ag
Researchers at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service Cropping Systems and Water Quality Research Unit in Columbia, Missouri are studying which combinations of precision agriculture methods work best. According to an article in the March 2007 issue of Agricultural Research magazine, researchers Newell Kitchen, Robert Lerch and Ken Sudduth are working to demonstrate how precision agriculture can be an economically viable tool … Read More