Precision Agriculture (PA) techniques for smallholder farmers in the US: status and potential opportunities

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_19How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Smallholder farming; precision agriculture; robotics; Internet-of-Things (IoT); automation; Artificial Intelligence (AI); drones

Abstract

Smallholder farmers play an important role in ensuring world food security. More than one-third of global food is produced by smallholder farming systems. Besides food security, small-scale farming also provides numerous other direct and indirect environmental, social, cultural, and economic benefits by improving crop diversification, job security, and self-sufficiency. Smallholder farmers in U.S. play an important role as well. Most farms in the U.S. are small family farms, and they operate almost half of U.S. farmland, while generating 21 % of production (USDA 2021). Success and upliftment of smallholder farming systems will play a key role in feeding the predicted 9 billion earth’s population by 2050. However, small-scale agriculture faces several challenges including reduced farm income, lack of technology, poor access to information and capital, market and certification barriers, and labor shortage. These challenges are further exacerbated by climate change, population increase, water scarcity, and soil degradation. Agriculture has seen a lot of technological advancements in the last few decades. This substantial transformation in agriculture was led by advancements in precision agriculture (PA) technologies like Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), auto-steering, crop and soil sensors, rate control technologies of crop inputs, and yield mapping. PA Precision Agricultural technologies have proven their worth by making farm operations automated, more efficient, and sustainable. However, PA has not always been an economically viable option for small or medium farm operations. The objective of this paper is to review the status and potential opportunities offered by advanced agriculture technologies and PA techniques that can benefit smallholder farmers in U.S.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Rajveer Dhillon
AU  - Qianna Moncur
AU  - Cadance Lowell
AU  - Sakthi Kumaran
AU  - Alcinda Folck
AU  - Deng Cao
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/11/22
TI  - Precision Agriculture (PA) techniques for smallholder farmers in the US: status and potential opportunities
BT  - Proceedings of the National Conference on Next-Generation Sustainable Technologies for Small-Scale Producers (NGST 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 166
EP  - 175
SN  - 2468-5747
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_19
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_19
ID  - Dhillon2023
ER  -