Precision Agriculture Technologies for Crop and Livestock Production in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Modern technologies are penetrating all fields of human activity, including agriculture, where they significantly affect the quantity and quality of agricultural production. Precision agriculture can be characterised as an effort to improve the results of practical farming, achieving higher profits by exploiting the existing spatial unevenness of soil properties. We aim to evaluate precision agriculture technologies’ practical use in agricultural enterprises in the Czech Republic. The research was based on a questionnaire survey in which 131 farms participated. We validated the hypothesis through a Chi-squared test on the frequency of occurrence of end-use technology. The results showed that precision farming technologies are used more in crop than livestock production. In particular, 58.02% of enterprises use intelligent weather stations, 89.31% use uncrewed vehicles, and 61.83% use navigation and optimisation systems for optimising journeys. These technologies are the most used and closely related to autonomous driving and robotics in agriculture. The results indicate how willing are agricultural enterprises to adopt new technologies. For policy makers, these findings show which precision farming technologies are already implemented. This can make it easier to direct funding towards grants and projects.

Evaluation of Growth Responses of Lettuce and Energy Efficiency of the Substrate and Smart Hydroponics Cropping System

“…The IoT keeps track of humidity, temperature, nutrient solution, PH, and electrical conductivity in the hydroponic farming ecosystem. The system in [ 7 , 8 , 22 ] has the IoT keep track of parameters in a hydroponic farm which also aims to help amateur farmers by making the system automatic through an Android app and a built-in alarm that alerts the user of any abnormal condition. Similar alternative arrangements for hydroponics can also be seen in [ 10 ].…”

“…Types of available grow lights are: light emitting diodes (LED) grow lights, fluorescent grow lights, and high-pressure sodium (HPS) or high-intensity discharge (HID) grow lights [ 7 ]. All the threshold values are set in the sensors, and if any parameter crosses the range or drops below a limit, alternative arrangements will be activated to compensate [ 8 ]. The agricultural setup is generally located in residential and commercial areas where the user may be able to attend to other commitments, leaving the system to attend to the crops [ 9 ].…”

Trends and Influential Works in Sustainable Crop Management: A Bibliometric Study

“…Although they have contributed significantly to the rise in food production over the past century, traditional agricultural methods have frequently come at a great environmental cost. Concerns about soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and overuse of synthetic chemicals and water have brought major doubts about the sustainability of these techniques in the long run [15]- [17].…”

Robots and Autonomous Machines for Sustainable Agriculture Production

“…The final category has four papers under the following sub-heading: Systematic solutions [5,6,19,21]. Emmi et al [5] presented an architecture to integrate the different components of an autonomous robot that provides access to the cloud, taking advantage of the services provided regarding data storage, scalability, accessibility, data sharing, and data analytics.…”

“…Precision agriculture, which addresses the spatial and temporal variability of soils and crops to reduce agricultural inputs and improve agricultural production reporting, varies greatly in implementation from country to country. Vrchota et al [21] evaluated precision agriculture technologies' practical use in agricultural enterprises in the Czech Republic, which is a reference for the development and implementation of precision agriculture technology and equipment in each country.…”