Precision agriculture - opportunities, benefits and pitfalls of site-specific crop management in Australia

Precision agriculture is the term given to crop management methods which re cognise and manage within-paddock spatial and temporal variations in the so il-plant-atmosphere system. This paper reviews the principles, practice and perceived benefits of precision agriculture. The objective of precision agriculture is to improve the control of input v ariables such as fertiliser, seed, chemicals or water with respect to the d esired outcomes of increased profitability, reduced environmental risk or b etter product quality. The practice can be viewed as comprising 4 stages: i nformation acquisition; interpretation; evaluation; and control. Much of th e technology to acquire information and control machinery is available or a t a late stage of development. However, methods of interpretation are less well developed.