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A GPS Backpack System for Mapping Soil and Crop Parameters in Agricultural Fields

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2009

J. V. Stafford
Affiliation:
(Sihoe Research Institute, Bedford)
J. M. LeBars
Affiliation:
(CEMAGREF Varennes-sur-Allier, France)

Abstract

Farmers are having to gather increasing amounts of data on their soils and crops. Precision agriculture – the targeting of inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides according to locally determined (‘metre-by-metre’) requirements – is based on a knowledge of the spatial variation of soil and crop parameters across a field. The data has to be spatially located and GPS is an effective way of doing this. A backpack data logging system with GPS position tagging is described which has been designed to aid a fanner in the manual collection of data.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Navigation 1996

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References

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