A Review of the Factors Affecting Adoption of Precision Agriculture Applications in Cotton Production

Abstract

Precision agriculture (PA) is a modern farming management system adopted throughout the world, which employs cropping practices by observing and measuring the temporal and spatial variability in fields to enhance the sustainability of agricultural production through more efficient use of land, water, fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides. The efficiency of precision agriculture technologies (PAT) in agricultural production mainly depends on the use of site-specific agricultural inputs accurately through decision support mechanisms by observing and measuring the variables such as soil condition, plant health, and weed intensity. Although there have been significant developments in PAT, especially remote sensing as a key source of information available in support of PA in recent years, its adoption has been very slow by farmers due to a variety of reasons. The main aim of this chapter is to provide a critical overview of how recent developments in sensing technologies, geostatistical analysis, data fusion, and interpolation techniques can be used in the cotton production systems to optimize yields while minimizing water, chemical pesticide, and nitrogen inputs and analysis the main factors influencing the adoption of PAT by cotton farmers. Therefore, this chapter includes a compressive literature survey of the studies done on the current use and trends of PAT, and on farm level use of PA in cotton production worldwide.