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Precision agriculture
Precision agriculture has the potential to improve productivity and generate environmental and health benefits. Precision agriculture technology effectively combines data-intensive analytics with data-guided farming equipment (box 5.1), generating environmental benefits such as water savings and reduced nutrient runoff and pesticide use (Mondal and Basu 2009). Benefits to farmers include savings in labor and input costs (seed, fertilizer, pesticides, water), optimized timing of crop management practices, ability to give insight into crop variability over large acreage, and reduced exposure to pesticides.
BOX 5.1
The future of farming: Artificial intelligence and precision agriculture are fast changing the technology landscape Machines called “agribots,” from a variety of companies, are appearing in the agricultural fields in many shapes and sizes. The development of agribots is driven by artificial intelligence. These electrically powered devices can do a variety of agricultural tasks, such as monitoring of crops (nutrient status and presence of weeds, pathogens, or pests), weeding (electrocution), spraying and micro-dosing nutrients or pesticides, hoeing, and harvesting. Self-contained agribots will have to compete with systems towed by smart tractors. Most modern tractors and combine harvesters can steer themselves across fields using satellite positioning and other sensors. Some tractors use digital maps of crops obtained by satellites and drones to highlight the places that require fertilizer or pesticides (Economist 2020). Asia’s wealthier nations are advancing the Internet of Things (IoT) and automation in field monitoring and precision agriculture. In 2016, Japan opened the world’s first robot farm. The Singaporean firm Garuda Robotics is providing drones to Southeast Asian farmers. In the Republic of Korea, the government began testing a “smart farm village” in Sejong City in 2015, providing farmers with a suite of smart agriculture tools including remote sensing and automated controls, all connected to smartphones, resulting in a 23 percent increase in efficiency. Malaysia is also making great strides—the government included agriculture as part of the national 2015 IoT plan, incorporating a pilot project that applied the IoT to aquaculture traceability. Malaysia’s information and communication technology research and development center is also
conducting trials of sensor technology to help plan the timing of oil palm pollination (Green 2018). China is also experimenting with precision farming. The modern agriculture project in Hubei province uses the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, which combines high-precision positioning technology with sensor technology to realize accurate monitoring of soil moisture, farm machinery autopilot control, and direct seed precision planting. Another example is the intelligent rice bud production system in Heilongjiang province, which conducts real-time data collection through temperature and moisture sensors in greenhouses to achieve intelligent micro-spraying and electric shutter ventilation control (ADB 2018). Precision technology and field-monitoring tools must be adapted to smallholder contexts to have an impact. Most field-level precision agriculture innovations are not about agribots or automation but about less advanced and less costly applications. The most appropriate tools for smallholders are often singular, low-cost tools, such as chlorophyll meters, although smallholders involved in cooperatives can make use of larger precision agriculture packages (Giovannucci et al. 2012; Ortolani and Bella 2015; Teng 2017). Other notable low-tech innovations in the region include kits for digital soil testing, smallholder algae production (Feed the Future 2017), and solar-powered irrigation (Arizona State University 2017). The Philippines has been using unmanned drones equipped with navigation and photographic technology to identify land vulnerable to natural disasters, and the country’s space satellite program included the launch of Diwata-1, continued
