Precision agriculture for grain production systems

This excellent little book will be of great interest to many readers of this journal, in that it treats in considerable detail the concepts, tools, and techniques of precision agriculture (PA), to help ensure food security for future generations. All over the world, more and more grain farmers are adopting the PA methodology, as well as in a broad range of other cropping industries. The book, written by two recognized experts in this field, consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 gives a very concise introduction to PA. This is followed by a good chapter on the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and PA. This describes in very clear terms the agricultural uses for Global Position System (GPS). Chapters 3 and 4 describe the hardware and software required for PA. It is followed by a chapter on data management, Chapters 6 and 7 go into much more detail on how to make and interpret maps for PA and on yield variability and site-specific crop management. The final chapter is on the economics of PA in Australian grain crops. The following paragraphs describe in more detail about the content of these chapters. The introductory chapter gives two very good definitions of PA. The first one is: ‘PA is an integrated informationand production-based farming system that is designed to increase long-term, site-specific, and whole-farm production efficiency, productivity, and profitability while minimizing unintended impacts on wildlife and the environment’. The second definition narrows down the PA philosophy of timely management of variation down to its implementation in cropping systems, what the authors call ‘site-specific crop management’ (SSCM), defined as: ‘A form of PA whereby decisions on resource application and agronomic practices are improved to better match soil and crop requirements as they vary in the field’. SSCM, the authors show can help achieve the farmers’ objectives of optimizing production efficiency, optimizing quality, minimizing the environmental impacts of farming practices, and minimizing risk. The chapter contains some nice figures, diagrams, and tables on the role of georeferencing, and on stages for the progressive adoption of PA in grain production. Chapter 2 on GNSS has a very good section on all the possible errors of GPS measurements, which may be critical for high accuracy applications of PA. It also contains a useful section on GNSS-based vehicle navigation systems, which can help International Journal of Digital Earth, 2013 Vol. 6, No. 6, 610 612