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Tapuwa Mashangwa
AGRICULTURAL mechanisation, one of the great achievements of the 20th century, was enabled by technologies that created value in agricul­tural production practices through efficient use of labour, the timeliness of operations, and more efficient input management with a focus on sustainable, high-productivity systems.

Historically, affordable machinery, which increased capability, standardisation and measurably improved productivity, was a key enabler of agricultural mechanisation.

As society matured great innovations transformed the face of agriculture. Taking advantage of a large labour base and draught power, farmers had been able to manage reasonable areas of land. This form of agriculture was still practised in some places until the mid- 20th century.

Later, electronically controlled hydraulics and power systems were the enabling tech­nologies for improving machine performance and pro­ductivity.

With electronically addressable machine architecture, coupled with public access to global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology in the mid-1990s, mechanisation in the last 20 years has been focused on leveraging information, automation, and communication to advance on-going trends in the pre­cision control of agricultural production systems.

Today’s increasingly automated agricultural produc­tion systems depend on the collection, transfer, and management of information by ICT to drive increased productivity.

What was once a highly mechanical system is becoming a dynamic cyber-physical system (CPS) that combines the cyber, or digital, domain with the physical domain.

Precision agriculture is another technology that is increasingly utilised, or precision farming, is a sys­tems approach for site-specific management of crop production systems.

The foundation of precision farm­ing rests on geospatial data techniques for improving the management of inputs and documenting produc­tion outputs.

According to Sevila, F and Blackmore, S in the paper “Role of ICTs for an Appropriate World Market Development”, as the size of farm implements and machines increased, farmers were able to manage larger land areas.

At first, these large machines typically used the same control levels across the width of the implement, even though this was not always the best for specific portions of the landscape that might have different spatial and other characteristics.

A key technology enabler for precision farming resulted from the public availability of GNSS, a tech­nology that emerged in the mid-1990s. GNSS pro­vided metre, and eventually decimetre, accuracy for mapping yields and moisture content.

A number of ICT approaches were enabled by precision agriculture, but generally, its success is attributable to the design of machinery with the capacity for variable-rate applica­tions.

Examples include precision planters, sprayers, fertiliser applicators, and tillage instruments.

The predominant control strategies for these systems are based on management maps developed by farmers and their crop consultants.

Typically, mapping is done using a geographic information system (GIS), based on characteristics of crops, landscape, and prior harvest operations.

In a research conducted by Hendrickson L, titled Landscape Position Zones and Reference Strips sources of data for site-specific maps can be satel­lite imaging, aerial remote sensing, GIS mapping, field mapping and derivatives of these technologies.

Some novel concepts being explored suggest that manage­ment strategies can be derived from a combination of  geospatial terrain characteristics and sensed informa­tion. All of these systems are enabled by ICT.

A competitive technology for map-based precision farming is on-the-go sensing systems, based on the con­cept of machine-based sensing of agronomic properties (plant health, soil properties, presence of disease or weeds, etc). The immediate use of these data drives control systems for variable-rate applications.

These sensor capabilities essentially turn the agricultural vehicle into a mobile recording system of crop attri­butes measured across the landscape. In fact, current production platforms are increasingly becoming tools for value-added applications through ICT.

The writer is Eng Tapuwa Justice Mashangwa, a young entrepreneur based in Bulawayo, Founder and CEO of Emerald Agribusiness Consultancy. He can be contacted on +263739096418 and [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>