Precision Farming also for Small Scale Farmers

The current and future food insecurity situation of many nations has been effected by factors like global warming, population growth, bio-energy, low technology acceptance, unfavourable policies, sustainability criteria, changing natural risk-management and subsidies. Food availability is a basic human need and, if left unattended undermines any other development effort. Sustainability-, agriculture-, forestryand environmental targets are interlinked and influence each other. There are needed new types of land management covering protection of land and biodiversity, guaranteeing a sustainable management and a multipurpose land use, optimising the economical benefit and evaluating the land use potential with its carrying capacity. ICT technologies underplayed with expert data, easy to use software– and precision farming technologies will be essential to achieve a sustainable bettering – if no-one is suspended. Even small-farmers must have access to know-how, equipment and technologies to optimise the food production processes by taking into account nutritional and/or biomass targets and to secure a sustainable agricultural development. Training of land owners, new types of advisory services and a rise of public awareness must be accompanying measures. FARM MAPS – GIS DATA: The First requirement for precision farming (PF) is the setup of GIS data to have details about the location of the field or also the forest department. The data to gather are the field polygon that gives the size in hectare of the field and is the base for all later calculation. A failure of e.g. 5% in the length measurement of a field would show a failure of nearly 10% in the size of the field; and this failure has impact to all further actions all following calculations would be 10% wrong. This shows the need of having exact field polygons as first requirement. As I do not assume that all small farmers will be running their own PF equipment as well as have the necessary ICT environment, the future will show us PF service providers for regions or even complete countries. The technology enables a farmer to send a contract to a service provider including a map that shows in detail where, what and when has to be done, e.g. PF – fertilisation based on a chlorophyll map or based on a soil investigation including the knowhow of the history of the field. UNDERLAYING EXPERT DATA: Integrative ICT technology like “AGROffice” which bases on the GIS-System “WinGIS” guarantees to plan with the embedded expert model what is the next requirement. It makes no sense that every farmer builds up his own database of seeds,