The “Null Hypothesis” of Precision Agriculture Management

As precision agriculture strives to improve the management of agricultural industries, the importance of scientific validation must not be forgotten. Eventually, the improvement that is imparted by precision agriculture management must be considered in terms of profitability and environmental impact (both short and long term). As one form of precision agriculture, we consider site-specific crop management to be defined as: “Matching resource application and agronomic practices with soil and crop requirements as they vary in space and time within a field.” While the technological tools associated with precision agriculture may be most obvious, the fundamental concept will stand or fall on the basis of scientific experimentation and assessment. Crucial then to scientifically validating the concept of site-specific crop management is the proposal and testing of the null hypothesis of precision agriculture, i.e. “Given the large temporal variation evident in crop yield relative to the scale of a single field, then the optimal risk aversion strategy is uniform management.” The spatial and temporal variability of important crop and soil parameters is considered and their quantification for a crop field is shown to be important to subsequent experimentation and agronomic management. The philosophy of precision agriculture is explored and experimental designs for Precision agriculture are presented that can be employed in attempts to refute the proposed null hypothesis.