Maximizing the Potato Crop Yield Through Smart Farming
Farmers' ultimate goal in their quest for economically efficient agricultural production is to maximize potato crop yield while investing the least amount of money. Early detection of tuber crop yield problems can greatly aid in reducing losses and achieving the desired yield and profit. Potato is ranked as the fourth most important staple in the world, and its popularity is growing rapidly.
The increased interest in potatoes, combined with shrinking agricultural lands, highlights the need for improved germplasm yield (seeds, plants, or plant parts useful in crop breeding, research, and conservation efforts), improved crop protection, and much more efficient and productive management systems. That’s why the prediction of potato crop yield before the harvest period can be very useful in pre-harvest and marketing decision-making.
Only by increasing yield per hectare and production quality, can potato crop profitability be achieved. In this respect, modern technologies such as precision agriculture, which is based on mechatronics engineering, should ensure potato crop productivity and profitability while also protecting the environment and conserving natural resources.
Precision agriculture or smart farming, according to Wageningen University & Research (WUR), means that plants receive precisely the treatment they require, as determined with great accuracy by cutting-edge technology. GPS, sensor technology, ICT, and robotics are among the technologies used to achieve this goal.
Technology can assist in strategic decision-making at the farm level, as well as with operational actions at the plant level. This allows production to be optimized and means that the technology beneficiaries can work on more sustainable crops. The big difference with classical agriculture is that rather than determining the necessary action for each field, precision agriculture allows actions to be determined per square meter or even per plant. Precision agriculture management considers the monitoring of the crops' vegetation status. This is done by calculating and interpreting vegetation indices based on spectral data collected by specialized acquisition systems.
The most difficult issue with precision agriculture is the amount of data collected, which can be difficult to interpret and often overwhelming, but it becomes less and less problematic as computing power and communication interfaces between different networked systems become more powerful, user-friendly, and less expensive.
You can read the rest of this article in your complimentary e-copy of Issue 3 of Potato Business Digital 2022 magazine, which you can access by clicking here.
