If there has been one constant in agriculture over the years, it has been the need to maximize yield for a given space of land. Farmers have long known that due to varying drainage and soil properties, different parts of an individual field require different levels of input. And many of them, especially when the farms were smaller in size, practiced a type of precision farming. But they had to do it on a manual basis. It is only within the last few years that technology has caught up with the concept.
Farmers are now able to manage individual areas of their fields more accurately.
GPS uses a system of satellites to provide users with accurate information about their position and velocity anywhere in the world. Developed by the U.S. military during the 1970s and 1980s, GPS was not available to the general agricultural community until 1992, but it had an immediate impact on precision farming. Without it, precision farming as we know it would not have been possible. These monitors gave farmers a new way to measure and adapt for variances within a given field. But the development of yield monitors coupled with the availability of GPS allowed us to start to look at variability within fields based on yield levels, and to adjust the application of agricultural input accordingly.