Innovation and Diffusion of Site-specific Crop Management

The concept and philosophy behind precision farming is not different from traditional farm management, namely that the field should be cultivated according to the temporal and variation on the field and with an ultimate goal of obtaining better gross margins. In principle, farmers have been practising precision farming for centuries. Most farmers possess site-specific knowledge about soil conditions and expected yields and they often know where to expect areas with weeds, drought and scarce water resources in the field. Precision farming is taking place all over the world either with or without global positioning systems (GPS). Currently, about 400 Danish farmers are expected to use GPS on their farms (Pedersen, 2003). Even in developing countries, such as Tanzania, simple precision farming systems occur. At the local tea plantations, small field plots are registered and the yields related to a given sub-unit are measured during harvest by weighing each tea yield individually. By doing so the farmer is able to point out where to plant new tea bushes. A similar approach was prevalent in Denmark and Europe years ago, when the individual peasants had small and nearly subsistence-based family holdings. Each field was divided into sub-units according to soil type and yield potentials — often divided with hedges and stone fences. Often the individual sub-fields were devoted to a particular arable crop (Blackmore et al., 2002).