Precision agriculture - opportunities, benefits and pitfalls of site-specific crop management in Australia

Precision agriculture is the term given to crop management methods which recognise and manage within-paddock spatial and temporal variations in the soil-plant-atmosphere system. This paper reviews the principles, practice and perceived benefits of precision agriculture. The objective of precision agriculture is to improve the control of input variables such as fertiliser, seed, chemicals or water with respect to the desired outcomes of increased profitability, reduced environmental risk or better product quality. The practice can be viewed as comprising 4 stages: information acquisition; interpretation; evaluation; and control. Much of the technology to acquire information and control machinery is available or at a late stage of development. However, methods of interpretation are less well developed.