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Farmers Investing in GPS

The global positioning system (GPS) is not just a powerful tool for courier providers and adventurous travellers, but also for those in the agricultural sector. The integration of GPS into geographic information system (GIS) is specially helpful for achieving precision agriculture and site-specific farming. Both GPS and GIS technologies allow farmers to efficiently manipulate and analyse large amounts of agriculture-related data. GPS-based applications simplify the various pursuits under precision farming such as farm planning, soil sampling, tractor guidance, yield mapping, and crop scouting. With the help of GPS devices, farmers can still work during low visibility due to rain, dust, fog, and darkness.

Manufacturers have developed different GPS equipment, which help agricultural investments become more productive and profitable via precision farming. Presently, agribusiness operations may be enhanced through GPS-derived products. It is easy for farmers to collect information about remote field boundaries, roads, irrigation systems, and problem areas in farmlands. Year after year, farmers may accurately navigate to certain locations collecting soil samples and monitoring crop conditions.


Years ago, farmers can hardly correlate production methods and crop yields with land variability. Hence, they were relatively incapable of developing sound soil-plant treatment strategies needed to maximise production. It was normal for them to treat their farmland uniformly. With the use of GPS, precise farming is attainable. Farmers now have a tool to guide them about precise application and dispersion of fertilisers, herbicides, or pesticides. They are able to adopt and benefit from farm micromanagement, where a large tract of land is divided into smaller parts, and parts with similar soil characteristics are treated the same. As a result, farmers were able to reduce expenses, produce high yields, and create environment-friendly fields.

Contrary to popular belief, precision agriculture is not only useful in large farms with sizeable capital investment and ample experience in information technology. Small-scale farming can equally benefit from inexpensive and easy-to-use methods of precision agriculture. Valuable information on improving land and water use can be collected and analysed using GPS, GIS, and remote sensing. This is what smaller farms require to realise high yields despite their size.

Indeed, GPS and its integration with GIS and other farming methods enable farmers to achieve precision farming, resulting in high yields and optimum profits.

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