Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 14
Summary and Perspectives
Hermann J. Heege
Future farming has to provide high yields in order to feed the growing world
population, but should do this with an environmental impact that is sustainable.
With the limited resources of the planet earth, this dual challenge can only be met by
precise adaptation to the locally varying conditions. And since the fi eld boundaries
by no means are precise environmental borders, this necessitates site-specifi c farming
within single fi elds.
The prospects in site-specifi c farming depend largely on the possibilities to sense
the properties of soils and crops. An impressive variety of site-specifi c sensing
techniques has been developed and is ready for its use. The spatial resolutions that
can be obtained by these techniques allow up to 100 signals per ha and sometimes
much more, which is a substantial improvement to the present situation of treating
the whole fi eld uniformly. However, in addition to the spatial resolution, the temporal
situation is important.
Some soil properties can be regarded as being temporally stable, such as texture,
organic matter content, cation-exchange-capacity, elevation, slope and its orientation.
Hence these properties or their sensing surrogates lend themselves for mapping on
a rather permanent basis. It may be reasonable to improve the mapping precision for
these properties by repeating the recording and thus creating
maps of the mean
or
by correcting the maps for the infl uence of
e.g.
the transient factor water. But once
these maps of the means or corrected maps have been created, they can be used as
perennial map
s
. The challenge is the adequate processing of the mapped information
for the control of farming operations.
But besides perennial maps, seasonal maps are a reasonable approach for
soil properties that can be regarded as being constant only on a short-term basis.
