Agricultural field mapping is an increasingly important way to monitor your land and manage future activities. It helps to understand and map different types of information, including data regarding soil health and nutrition, slopes, water and irrigation systems. When done accurately, field mapping services enable you to employ management practices on your land that are designed to maximize land use, increase productivity, use resources more efficiently and reduce potentially damaging activities. It also allows you to correct or modify current behaviours.
Maps Are Indispensable in Modern-Day Farming
Maps have been critical assets for farmers throughout history. Landowners and farmers know their fields like the backs of their hands. With the addition of digital maps, agribusinesses gain a competitive advantage by knowing their land precisely based on geodata, not just experience.
Agricultural field mapping is an essential part of precision farming. Mapping technologies help farmers find the exact locations and variabilities across all crops on their farms and navigate the area. They also can display location data on any crops. Apart from knowing the precise locations of crops, growers and agribusinesses can get a ton of valuable data on soil, product origins, moisture, and nutrient levels.
How Does it Solve The Challenges Faced by Agribusinesses?
Agribusiness leaders must accurately distinguish between different fields and manage them independently and appropriately, improve efficiency and productivity, reduce maintenance and operational costs, and increase profitability by shifting from seasonal revenue to sustainable and predictable business growth. The ultimate goal is to produce the highest yielding, most balanced and uniform crop possible. To achieve these goals, agribusinesses adopt precision farming technologies, including field mapping services.
Precision mapping takes first place among these technologies. It combines telematics data from sensors with images from satellites and drones, matching them with maps to help agribusinesses achieve their goals within the location context. Proven results are expected to drive even higher adoption of mapping technologies in the future.
Crop Health Monitoring
Manually checking crops, or scouting, across a large area is the slowest and most labour-intensive method of monitoring crop health. Remote sensing and GIS in agriculture are lifesavers for this.
GIS-based precision agriculture can help to prioritize which crops need extra care. Imagery sensors on satellites and aircraft provide an advanced method for monitoring crop temperatures. An abnormally high temperature could indicate disease, pest infestation, or dehydration.
Livestock Monitoring
Agriculture GIS software is essential for tracking animals’ movements in animal husbandry. GIS agriculture tools help farmers locate livestock on a farm and monitor their health, growth, fertility, and nutrition. Animal trackers and a portable device that can receive and display tracker data enable this application.
Insect And Pest Control
Scouting large fields for pest infestations is wasteful. Instead, deep learning algorithms and satellite data can assist in finding unhealthy problem spots.
Crop Monitoring aids in detecting various risks, from weeds to crop diseases, using field-collected vegetation indices. If the index map indicates low vegetation in a small area, meaning the possible presence of a parasite or condition, a scout no longer has to investigate a large field. After identifying the probable infection zone using the vegetation index, you can use the Scouting feature to narrow your target area. Scouts can inspect the selected location and rapidly send photos of accomplished tasks and threat types using crop monitoring technologies.
Irrigation Control
Dry spells and extreme precipitation in low-lying areas without adequate drainage can ruin crop output. Through agriculture GIS technology, farmers may assess the water stress experienced by each crop and recognize visual patterns that suggest an oversupply or deficiency of water, which can be used to regulate irrigation.
Water stress is typically detected using the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) or Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI) indices. Negative numbers around -1 indicate water shortages, whereas positive ones near one could indicate waterlogging.
How Can You Compile The Most Accurate Maps?
Farmers and agricultural companies are realizing that they need more than just one map to monitor all critical factors for their business, and combine various technologies, tools, equipment, maps, and data. These include physical sensors installed on machinery and directly in the soil, GIS and GPS data, and images from satellites and drones.
In Conclusion
Precision mapping is fertilizing the tech revolution in agriculture. More private small farmers and big agro-holdings are embarking on the digital transformation journey to maximize crop yields by tapping GIS and GPS mapping solutions provided by agrotech companies. Likewise, agribusinesses see a low-hanging fruit in winning more customers by applying precision technologies to their operations and services. In addition, they may feast their eyes on sustainable business growth thanks to precise geodata received from agriculture maps. If you are looking for field mapping experts, SoilOptix® can help. Visit https://soiloptix.com/ for a detailed consultation.