An Introduction to Precision Agriculture and its role in sustainable development of agriculture

Today, agriculture plays an important role in the world economy. It helps reduce poverty and also boosts sustainable development, especially in developing countries. The need of newtechnologies for increasing productivity along with reducing ecological pollutions, makes Agriculturalists search for new logical methods. Precision Agriculture is one of these methods and relies on sustainable agriculture and healthy food production. Farms have variable temporaland spatial characteristics, therefore the aim of precision farming is to determine the input, in relation to these variables. Due to this, the use of Variable rate technologies (which are equipment that automatically change the amount of material usage in relation to spatialpositions) is getting more common. In Precision Agriculture, sensors and converters are important. Because of them, the evaluation and guidance of equipment is done automatically.One of the important topics of Precision Agriculture is drawing the Yield Map. It helps usrecognize the damages and variables on the farm’s surface. These plans can be made using GPS with great precision and then by incorporating it with local geographical data in GIS network; we can manage the farm easier. The aim of this article is to define this technology in a simple, yetscientific manner.

کلیدواژه ها:

Precision Agriculture ، Global Positioning System (GPS) ، Sustainable Development ، Geographic Information System (GIS) ، Yield Map