Precision Agriculture: What's behind the name?

Abstract

In recent years, the term Precision Agriculture (PA) has been referred and discussed many times in agricultural exhibitions and conferences, professional meetings, magazines and cafés. Other forms are also used either by specifying the crop where it is applied, e.g. Precision Viticulture, or by using fancy names such as Smart Agriculture, Smart Farming or Digital Agriculture. In the academia, the evolution in the publication of scientific documents containing the terms 'Precision Agriculture or Farming' or 'Smart Agriculture or Farming' has been astonishing, starting with 0 documents in 1995 to more than 2,250 in 2015! The practice of PA largely refers to the rational use of agricultural inputs. To help us run our PA section in the magazine, New Ag International has partnered with one of the leaders in Europe: The Research Group on AgroICT & Precision Agriculture (GRAP) of the University of Lleida-Agrotecnio Center in Catalonia, Spain. In every issue of the magazine, Alexandre Escolà, Jose Antonio Martínez and Jaume Arnó with our Editorial Team will put together an editorial whose ambition is to help the various stakeholders bridge the gap between datanomics and commercial farming!