Precision Farming and Control of Crop Production

Dear Colleagues,

The industrial agri-food system that has been established over the last fifty years has led to the indiscriminate exploitation and irreversible deterioration of natural resources, incorrectly assumed to be unlimited and inexhaustible. The costs incurred in environmental and social terms as a result of intensive agriculture have been enormous, especially in terms of pollution, loss of biodiversity, soil fertility reduction, and marginal land abandonment, thus creating obvious sustainability issues. Nowadays, a possible response to the negative trend just described is represented by the development of technologies and the implementation of so-called precision agriculture (PA), whose birth dates back to the nineties in the United States, where it continues to have the widest spread and technical and technological evolution.

The development of the technology over the past decades has created platforms and sensors that are useful for acquiring more and more accurate data from the observation of the terrestrial surface for both geometry and radiometry. At the same time, scientific knowledge has allowed us to develop methods and techniques of data treatment for extracting information about the state of the terrestrial surface and natural resources. In this context, agriculture is one of the primary fields of application of Earth observation techniques.

Data from remote sensors can provide relevant information about the development and the conditions of the agricultural crops, thanks to the availability of multi- and iper-spectral sensors. Precision farming, born from a rational use of resources, is based on the availability of very detailed and spatially distributed information, relative to the conditions and the state of the crops in the field. Multi-optic and hyper-spectral sensors, as well as thermal sensors, measure the reflected and emitted radiation from surfaces using visible/infra-red wavelengths; therefore, it is possible to determine some of the characteristics of vegetated surfaces on the basis of their interactions with the incident solar radiation (part of the visible/infra-red near and medium electromagnetic spectrum) and/or on the basis of the emitted radiation (part of the infra-red electromagnetic thermal spectrum).

Data acquisition is not a trivial operation in agriculture, mainly because information is not directly usable if it is not gathered from appropriately calibrated sensors. Consequently, precision farming requires a cyclical process of data collection in a closed-chain control scheme for crop management and the evaluation of decisions, along with the peculiarity that a monitoring action cannot be limited to a single crop cycle, but spans several years to come, while retaining the memory of previous cycles. 

Prof. Maria Grazia D'Urso
Prof. Alberto Guarnieri
Dr. Shibendu S. Ray
Guest Editor

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