How can precision farming work on a small scale

The agri-food industry faces a great challenge due to the growing global population. When considering land scarcity, this can be solved only by a higher production efficiency. Precision agriculture (PA) provides a potential answer. Most farms, especially in developing countries, are small-scale units that have difficulties in applying precision agriculture technologies. On the basis of the systematically selected articles, major benefits and constraints were identified, and solutions were provided. Due to the low economic performance of smallholdings, (demonstrated) economic benefits are essential; however, it should be added that PA also provides potential environmental benefits. The five main constraints of precision agriculture technologies at the small-scale level are small land size, high cost of adoption, technology-related difficulties, lack of professional support and lack of supporting policy. The solutions provided by the literature are various, including, among others, joint/collective actions, zone delineation/field boundary detection, cooperation-cooperatives; low-cost technology, common machinery usage; education, (common) knowledge, use of standards, simple and user-friendly technology; professional support of vendors, advisors, agricultural contractor services; and policy-initiated investments and adequate regulations, respectively. Lower cost, modular technologies can help to accelerate PA uptake.

According to the official definition of the International Society for Precision Agriculture, “Precision Agriculture is a management strategy that gathers, processes and analyzes temporal, spatial and individual data and combines it with other information to support management decisions according to estimated variability for improved resource use efficiency, productivity, quality, profitability and sustainability of agricultural production.” (ISPA 2021). This definition clearly points out the crucial importance of human resources, although this is based on the continuous interactions of farmers (users) and different IT tools (machine). Information is undoubtedly essential even in the case of the simplest activities (e.g. GPS data for using an automated steering system); however, the specific technologies differ greatly. Being site specific is essential that requires data on soil (e.g. quality, fertility, nutrient profile, water absorption capacity, weed density) and weather conditions (e.g. rainfall, temperature) (Bhakta et al. 2019). Although the term “precision agriculture” is well defined, its implementation is fundamentally different between the developed and developing countries. In the former countries, a wider range of available elements are in use, especially by larger farms( Finger et al., 2019), while in the developing countries adoption is limited due to difficulties in accessing technology, capacity problems, and financial difficulties (Onyango et al. 2021). In addition, socio-economic barriers do matter, such as openness to innovation, knowledge sharing, age, complexity and cost of technology, available financial support, and farm size (Blasch et al., 2022). These are among the reasons why PA adoption shows different characteristics compared to other agricultural innovations, such as a slower adoption process for some technologies and greater divergence between the different farms (Erickson and Fausti, 2021).

Materials and methods

The articles were selected using the following sources: ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science. The keywords used for this search were precision farming, precision agriculture, small scale (with and without a hyphen), smallholder, small farm, crop, crop production, technology, and profit with the Boolean operator As precision farming and precision agriculture are frequently used interchangeably, it was important to incorporate both into the analysis. It has been observed that native English speaking scientists prefer to use the first, while scientists from other countries often opt for the last (Gusev et al. 2019). All the other keywords are related to the research question, which is whether precision farming works on a small scale, including technological and profit aspects. Crops and crop production were added to concentrate on the core segment of the PA that fits the ISPA definition the most. Unlike commodity crops, higher added-value segments of agricultural production, e.g. vegetables or flowers, can be easily profitable on a small scale. These keywords should be part of the title, keywords, or abstract of the article. However, it should be highlighted that small scale is a relative term. This means that the size of a small-scale farm significantly differs regionally, e.g., much smaller in Asia and much larger in North America.