PRECISION AGRICULTURE
For more information on precision agriculture research at
UW-Madison, please contact
John Norman.
Precision agriculture research at UW-Madison
is supported by
NASA's Regional
Earth Science Applications Center Program
. Other contributors
include
Case
NH,
USDA
Agricultural Research Service Soil and Water Research Unit
,
the Foundation for Agronomic Research,
and the
UW-Platteville
Pioneer Prairie Farm
(Wisconsin Agricultural Stewardship Initiative).
Cooperating partners include the Wisconsin
Discovery Farm Program and the
Wisconsin
Integrated Cropping Systems Trials
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Project Overview
Agriculture in the United States is experiencing multiple, and
sometimes conflicting demands. Productivity and profitability
have always been issues, and satisfying the demand for these has
usually meant ignoring environmental or sustainability concerns.
Today, the environmental effects of agricultural practices and
long-term sustainability are becoming of great concern to the
public. But environmental protection is often viewed as requiring
the sacrifice of productivity and profits.
Researchers at the Upper Midwest RESAC are creating tools to
study how agricultural management techniques can be used to simultaneously
protect the environment and maintain or increase profitability
and productivity.
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To accomplish this, we study the type of management that we believe
can have the most effects - precision agriculture. Precision agriculture
considers the the land on a square meter by square meter basis,
fine-tuning the crops, tillage, and application of nutrients to
precisely suit the plants on each part of the landscape.
The picture above is an illustration of this. The light green
areas are grassed waterways. The dark green areas are soybeans.
Although the grass does not produce a profitable crop for the
farmer, the grass serves to protect his field against erosion,
maintaining the long term productivity of this field, and protects
the environment by reducing agricultural chemical runoff. | |
