I do not want to be fat away from the modern trends of radio and television publications which advise how we have to manage our rural economy.

However, it is necessary to say that we have remembered about it recently. Two years, three years ago due to increase in rates and other inflation and reduce the levels. Unfortunately, the economy doesn’t hold much conferences, memoranda with the strategies, often heavily inspired after foreign voyages and treats, and other not really easy and not always productive activities.

And if you go back in the time of 2002-2008, time of growth, when the townspeople did not think about the rural land, thinking about loans, you can learn that in this time on the black earth with bad roads next to them so imperceptibly, but firmly and irrevocably the ways and means of agriculture have changed with a focus on the last ones. I have desire to write a few paragraphs about it …

I have to apologize in advance for the lack of words and their combinations popular among our “strategists”.

Taken from the Food Program of the year 1982, and replicated through the all party, television and radio programs. Only to “efficiency, maintenance, improvement,” and other “catch up and overtake”, adding “reform, privatization, sale” and other “feed the world with its own starving pensioners”. That’s why I will try to use my own words, and not just words, as well as my impressions and experience.

Precision agriculture, as I found out about it in 2005, appeared much earlier and not here.

First it was the simple things like devices providing parallel passages through the field in order not to leave their untreated gaps and overlaps from twice having processed and sowed.

Such navigator, cutting a field into strips with width of its disc harrow, for example. But the restless machines producers decided in his own way without asking his minister, and put the sensor antenna into combine having linked it by good software with yield sensor and having got a process chart, speckled with questions. Why? How?

We have done everything in a proper way! But the variety seems to be due to heterogeneity … or vice versa.

However now agronomists have never been called enemies of combine machines. Well, actually, not all agronomists are afraid of what is done on the crank. Yes, and the heterogeneity of the preceding paragraph had been seen by flying the cameras. Especially the one that we have under our feet, as it is seen in the three-dimensional scan measurement of soil conductivity below …

There are lots of reasons of various yielding irregularities. For instance, random spread of feed elements, landform and soil structure through the entire depth of the roots development. I have no doubt that I have mentioned all of them and I  am not even going to do it. The question is rally bothering  …

But it is an important part of precision agriculture, however, it is almost impossible without precise realizing other tasks, interference of which can’t be overestimated. For example, however you will use variables seeding and application rate, but if your sowing terms end in June and you are getting early crops for a month during good weather, it will not be able to appreciate and gain the benefits of new technologies. In addition if there is no precise understanding of the implementation of job responsibilities and common tasks by the all employees, then it will cause a lot of issues …

Precision of operations on the ground and around it leads to reduction of the time spent on them, which is the most precious resource. It must be thought out well. And logistics in the field is perhaps more important. Although some mistakes in the design of the elevator can easily stop all the harvesters in the field and get a significantly smaller number of high-quality grain. In this case, the accuracy of the compliance requirements of acceptance of grain including the grain storage capacity is really essential…

Sometimes, the high accuracy of definition of number of feed elements of the field divided into segments can identify and the absence of any different fertilizing needs. In such cases it is difficult to persuade the manager to sow only the seeds without anything. As it turns out, and the difference between the number of seeds collected on the field and between the ones collected on the field without application of mineral nutrition is not visible, it becomes clear how much and what we do not know and sometimes do not suspect. And manager has to think and think …

Also managers should be accurate in making decision. I have participated in the creation of an important and interesting idea. It was a draft order of the work beginning that was sent two weeks earlier to executives for approvals and comments. Then a meeting came, and the manager asked the attenders whether they all had read the draft order, if  there had been anything to add and correct… Everybody had. But the manager did not ask each of them as a schoolteacher, but simply gave the order text to the round table meeting for the signature of attenders’ agreement… Similarly, he found that two weeks it is enough, and that they have done it…

So, it means that agriculture accuracy is correct (according to the rules), validity and resources and time usage timeliness. In other words, in the equation of sustainable and profitable crop with quite unknown, we started finding only a few of them. And not all of them are technical and agrochemical… There are also human, climatic, political…

To understand the impact of all these X, Y and Z, it necessary to use, so often sounding in transatlantic agricultural world, term and method – BigData. That is a search of patterns in the huge information data of fields, markets and other useful observations.

The data from which patterns are formed, collected by rather accurate devices and sensor shoots and measurements. They are stored them carefully and without the farmer (the owner’s) permission can’t be to transfered, even if the custodian is bought. As a result, there is the solutions of improving the profitability of production of various grain, meat and milk. However, it is a subject of universities and associations. It seems that ours are busy doing something more important. But that’s the other story…

In spite of this fact, in the ranking of innovation, there are five agricultural companies, for which precision agriculture is a real business with results. Besides they aren’t only worth of places without award. Smaller companies work successfully and accurately, deprived of PR-services and PR-stores, they are not on the podium.

Oleg Prikhodko, an expert in precision agriculture of AgriLab, head of the Bureau of consulting center.

According to the materials: agroportal.ua