Economics of Precision Farming Practices in the Texas High Plains

Issue: Widespread utilization of fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals have significantly contributed to the enhancement of agriculture’s productivity in recent decades. Currently, production agriculture is facing many challenges such as increasing cost of production, shortage of irrigation water, and increased public concern on the impacts of agricultural production on the environment. To survive in the highly competitive world market of agricultural commodities, agricultural producers must produce high quality products at low prices while using environmentally sound practices. A way to address these issues is to adopt precision farming technology. Traditionally, input use in crop production has assumed field homogeneity with respect to soil fertility, soil moisture, pest populations, and crop characteristics. That is, optimal decision rules of input use do not account for differences of those characteristics within fields. Precision farming, precision agriculture, or site-specific management recognizes the variability of such factors within fields and seeks to optimize variable input use under these conditions. Precision farming is an advanced information-technology-based management system designed to identify, analyze and manage site-soil spatial and temporal variability within fields for optimum profitability, sustainability, and/or protection of the environment.

What has been done/discovered: Precision farming optimal decision rules of input use have been derived for cotton, grain sorghum, peanuts, and corn production. These results indicate that: (1) precision farming practices have the potential to be economically beneficial as compared to conventional practices, but widespread use of these practices will critically dependent on their adoption cost; (2) the economic benefits of precision farming practices are not evenly distributed across fields - in fact, we have found that spatial variability of both yields and profits across fields are magnified under precision farming practices as compared to conventional production practices; and (3) precision farming can effectively be used to identify “management zones” within fields where the potential for significant improvements in profits are possible.

Impact: This research could have significant impacts on the enhancement of the productivity and profitability of well over 5.0 million acres of cropland in the production of corn, grain sorghum, peanuts and cotton in the Texas High Plains. A potential also exists for this research to contribute towards the improved placement of chemicals on fields, and thus reduce the potential for environmental degradation from chemical use in agriculture in the Texas High Plains. Funding Sources: Precision Agriculture Initiative.

Contact: Eduardo Segarra
Precision Farming - Site Specific Production System
Research & Extension Center - Lubbock
Texas A&M Agriculture Program
Phone: 806-746-6101
Fax: 806-746-6528
eduardo.segarra@ttu.edu
http://