Status quo of adoption of precision agriculture enabling technologies in Swiss plant production
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Status quo of adoption of precision agriculture enabling technologies in Swiss plant production Tanja Groher1 · Katja Heitkämper1 · Achim Walter2 · Frank Liebisch2,3 · Christina Umstätter1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper presents the state of application of Precision Agricultural enabling Technology (PAT) in Swiss farms as an example for small-scale, highly mechanised Central European agriculture. Furthermore, correlations between farm and farmers’ characteristics and technology adoption were evaluated. Being part of a comprehensive and representative study assessing the state of mechanisation and automation in Swiss agriculture, this paper focuses on the adoption of Driver Assistance Systems (DAS) and activities in which Electronic Measuring Systems (EMS) are used. The adoption rate of DAS was markedly higher compared to EMS in all agricultural enterprises. The adoption rate was highest for highvalue enterprise vegetables and surprisingly low for the high-value enterprise grapes. The results of a binary logistic regression showed that farmers located in the mountain zone were less likely to adopt PAT compared to farmers in the valley. Small farm size correlated with low adoption rates and vice versa showing adoption happens country-specific in the upper farm size distribution. The results show the potential for novel technologies to be adopted by farmers of high-value products. Furthermore, technologies have been partially used to reduce physical workload but not yet to evaluate crop or management performance to support decisions. However, automatic collection and forwarding of data is a fundamental step towards Smart Farming realizing its full potential in the future. Keywords Digitalisation · Precision agriculture · Technology uptake · Drivers of adoption
Introduction The application and connection of digital technologies in agricultural production has been the focus of research and received increasing attention in the last years. The adoption of digital technologies in the agricultural sector comprises the use of electronic devices, * Tanja Groher [email protected] 1
Agroscope, Competitiveness and System Evaluation, Tänikon 1, 8356 Ettenhausen, Switzerland
2
Institute of Agricultural Sciences, ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
3
Agroscope, Agroecology and Environment, 8046 Zurich, Switzerland
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Precision Agriculture
robots, sensor technology and automation as well as the use of information and communication technologies. It is associated by terms such as Precision Agriculture (PA), Precision Farming (PF), Smart Farming, Digital Farming or Agriculture 4.0 (Paustian and Theuvsen 2017; Pierpaoli et al. 2013). Thereby, the aim of all these applications is to simplify and automate processes, reduce or even shift daily workloads from physical to cognitive labor and increase profitability while decreasing the ecological footprint of farming resulting in an integrated, improved and sustainable farm and decision management (Walter et al. 2017; Shepherd et
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