Description
The earliest stages of this change occurred in the row and broadacre cropping sectors in the early 1990s with the development of Global Positioning System (GPS) guidance systems, which were then augmented with auto-steer technology and grain harvester yield monitors. Subsequent developments included seeder and fertilizer applicators with the capacity to vary application rates within a field. More recently, software applications and cloud data storage facilities have enabled the resulting data to be captured, stored, and manipulated, and then used in decision-support tools to guide farm management decisions.
Digital agriculture applications have also emerged in the livestock and horticulture sectors, including, for example, electronic livestock identification systems, genomics, automated milking systems, automated livestock weighing platforms, telemetric irrigation and water management systems, remote sensing technologies, and instruments for the automated collection of weather and climatic information.
