Precision agriculture technologies positively contributing to ghg emissions mitigation, farm productivity and economics

Athanasios Balafoutis, Bert Beck, Spyros Fountas, Jurgen Vangeyte, Tamme Van Der Wal, Iria Soto*, Manuel Gómez-Barbero, Andrew Barnes, Vera Eory

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

353 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the economic sectors that affect climate change contributing to greenhouse gas emissions directly and indirectly. There is a trend of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions reduction, but any practice in this direction should not affect negatively farm productivity and economics because this would limit its implementation, due to the high global food and feed demand and the competitive environment in this sector. Precision agriculture practices using hightech equipment has the ability to reduce agricultural inputs by site-specific applications, as it better target inputs to spatial and temporal needs of the fields, which can result in lower greenhouse gas emissions. Precision agriculture can also have a positive impact on farm productivity and economics, as it provides higher or equal yields with lower production cost than conventional practices. In this work, precision agriculture technologies that have the potential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions are presented providing a short description of the technology and the impacts that have been reported in literature on greenhouse gases reduction and the associated impacts on farm productivity and economics. The technologies presented span all agricultural practices, including variable rate sowing/planting, fertilizing, spraying, weeding and irrigation.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1339
JournalSustainability
Volume9
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Farm productivity
  • Greenhouse gas emissions
  • Precision agriculture technologies
  • Precision physical weeding
  • Variable rate irrigation
  • Variable rate nutrient application
  • Variable rate pesticide application
  • Variable rate planting/seeding

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Precision agriculture technologies positively contributing to ghg emissions mitigation, farm productivity and economics'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this