Geographic Information Systems in Agriculture

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1990s, modern agriculture and farming has changed dramatically. Agriculture has become a high-tech industry. With the possibility of locating agricultural machinery in the field using satellite positioning technologies (Global Navigation Satellite Systems, GNSS) and the increasing availability of geographic information in digital form and in increasing quality, farmers are now able to measure the spatial and temporal variability in soil, vegetation, relief, etc., within a field and to modify their operations to react to this. Farmers keep electronic field records and farm diaries, which they are able to use on site with mobile electronic devices in order to enter or retrieve information. Agricultural machinery is also being continuously developed, since due to the in-field heterogeneity many different operations (from yield mapping to plant protection) are performed on site and logged so that they may be later evaluated by computer. Due to legal regulations (IACS, cross compliance, traceability, quality management, etc.), GIS (and GeoWeb services) and information-driven crop production are becoming common tools in agriculture, which must be integrated into usual farm practices.