One of the discoveries from overflights in 1998 and 1999 was that the image, taken two months before harvest, had an 87 percent correlation with the actual harvest yield. Normally in the science community a new correlation is studied in detail until it is fully understood before a paper is written explaining it from start to finish. We don't understand why it happens, but it happens, and that is enough for us to go forward and tell people that it exists. Especially since it happened more than once. Wersinger is reluctant to speculate on what it might eventually mean in improved agricultural economics.
Precision agriculture means different things because fields vary from region to region.
The economics are going to depend on the area, on the type of farm, and on what they mean by precision agriculture. However, tailoring the application of chemicals to real needs in the field will certainly benefit the environment, reducing water pollution. Another discovery is that wind apparently can affect the image collected by a remote instrument. One experiment over Georgia was designed to collect two sets of images 30 minutes apart. Because of the way the flight lines overlapped they acquired four images, two of them just 3 minutes apart.