Scope, importance, and limitations of precision-agriculture-based practices for crop management: Indian perspective

Agriculture is the backbone of Indian economy. It provides employment to the 70% of the country population and contributes about 30% in country GDP. The traditional farming seems to be not capable of feeding the burgeoning country population. Hence, the new generation technologies, namely precision agriculture (PA), need to be adopted to meet the forthcoming demand and challenges while enhancing crop productivity, resources use efficiency, and sustainability of the agricultural systems. The concept of PA uses the recent developments in sensors, greenhouse, and protected agriculture structures. In PA, the spatial variability occurring within a field is noted, mapped, and then management actions are taken by adopting site-specific management systems applying remote sensing, global positioning system, and geographical information system. PA visualizes economical and environmental benefits through reduced use of water, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides besides the farm equipment. Instead of managing/applying inputs to an entire field based upon some hypothetical average condition, the PA approach recognizes site-specific differences within fields and adjusts need-based management actions. The adoption of techniques is having greater scope for wider adoption in India for higher-quality production, sensible resources utilization, and environment protection. The scope of PA is different for the different countries due to many factors, namely socioeconomic condition, technical manpower, and size of landholding. As per the suitability and feasibility, variable rate technology, precision land leveling, precision planting and precision nutrient management by using leaf color chart, soil plant analysis development, green seeker, site-specific nutrient management, and soil test crop response are the main PA techniques commonly used in India for crop management.