Satellite Technologies to Support the Sustainability of Agricultural Production

Abstract

Precision farming is a form of multidisciplinary and technologically advanced agriculture, which recourses to machines equipped with "intelligent systems," able to dose the productive factors (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.) according to the real needs of the homogeneous areas constituent to the plot (Verhagen and Bouma, Modeling soil variability. In: Pierce FJ, Sadler EJ (eds) The state of site specific management for agriculture. ASA Publications, 1997).Experimental trials have been conducted in order to compare two satelliteguidance devices and two correction systems of the GPS signal: the EZ-Steer/ RTK and Autopilot/EGNOS. The machines used in the tests were the tractor New Holland T7060, the rotary harrow Alpego DG-400, and the burier Forigo DG-45, to determine which of the two systems ensured the best quality of work. The results obtained showed that the EZ-Steer/RTK system guaranteed a lower stability of the theoretical trajectory than the Autopilot/EGNOS system, above 1.69 %. From the elaboration of data of the two guidance systems behavior to manage the only width of transposition, it is observed that the EZ-Steer/RTK system is able to guarantee a better hold of the line compared to the Autopilot/EGNOS system, which provides a mistake of 176 cm on the total width of transposition and 2 cm on the mean value. In the matter of the normalized transposition surfaces, the Autopilot/EGNOS system ensures a better work quality.

Innovation in Basilicata agriculture: From tradition to digital

“…PF, initially welcomed with extreme caution and scepticism, is also spreading to small and medium-sized enterprises (D'Antonio P. et al, 2015) while experimental applications of Smart Agriculture have been launched for some years.…”

“…For example, Remote sensing techniques are used to monitor changes in agricultural soils, the Decision Support System (dds) to manage greenhouse production system (Dimitrijevic et al, 2015), while gis remain excellent tool to evaluate morphological and vegetation changes in agro-forest land over time. Among its numerous applications, there are the control of hydrogeological instability, the identification of the different categories of land use, the optimization of agricultural plastic waste management (Blanco et al, 2018) and mechanized management, more targeted and efficient, of some agricultural practices such as soil preparation, sowing, water and nutrient management, weeding, harvesting and sorting of harvested products (Precision Farming, Agriculture 3.0) (Falzarano, 2018;D'Antonio et al, 2015;D'Antonio et al, 2011).…”