The introduction of the Global Positioning System (GPS) is one of the many improvements that agriculture has enjoyed in recent times.
According to the National Museum of American History, The satellite-based GPS system was first developed by the U.S. Departments of Defense in the 1970s. In the 1990s agricultural engineers began combining on-the-go crop yield readings with GPS tracking to create crop yield maps.
The most basic use of the GPS in agriculture was to see the bigger variations in crops and animals on the farm but as the years rolled on GPS has taken more important roles. Farmers can now precisely locate specific locations on the farm, detect what soil is best used for what crop, and also locate the more fertile lands in the field through the crop yield maps that are being generated by the Global Positioning System.
No one wants to put a lot of effort and rigour into a work such as agriculture only to find out that the result isn’t commensurate with the efforts because of factors like pests and insects. GPS helps farmers to map pests and insects dominated areas so that they can stay away from such areas till the pests are being controlled. This will make farmers work smartly with precision and more efficiently.
GPS devices can be used also in spraying pests control chemicals and also fertilizers more easily with more accuracy.
One interesting fact about the Precision farming of GPS is that it is not only available for a selected few, even small agricultural startups can take advantage of the many benefits of GPS because of it’s cost-effectiveness.
It’s fascinating how much more we can do with little efforts with this easy to use technology, GPS.
