Precision Agriculture Technologies for Crop and Livestock Production in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Modern technologies are penetrating all fields of human activity, including agriculture, where they significantly affect the quantity and quality of agricultural production. Precision agriculture can be characterised as an effort to improve the results of practical farming, achieving higher profits by exploiting the existing spatial unevenness of soil properties. We aim to evaluate precision agriculture technologies’ practical use in agricultural enterprises in the Czech Republic. The research was based on a questionnaire survey in which 131 farms participated. We validated the hypothesis through a Chi-squared test on the frequency of occurrence of end-use technology. The results showed that precision farming technologies are used more in crop than livestock production. In particular, 58.02% of enterprises use intelligent weather stations, 89.31% use uncrewed vehicles, and 61.83% use navigation and optimisation systems for optimising journeys. These technologies are the most used and closely related to autonomous driving and robotics in agriculture. The results indicate how willing are agricultural enterprises to adopt new technologies. For policy makers, these findings show which precision farming technologies are already implemented. This can make it easier to direct funding towards grants and projects.