Precision Farming: an Approach for Productivity and Resilience in Fruit Crops

The impact of climate change on agricultural production forced human to rethink about unscientific practices such as indiscriminate fertilizer and pesticide application, land use changes, livestock management etc. leading to emission of greenhouse gasses, 24% of which is contributed by agriculture. Fruit crops are perennial in nature and thus a proper planning needs to be adopted for maintaining a sustainable production in an orchard. Precision farming helps minimizing environmental impact by reducing resource use while maximizing productivity and it fulfills the criteria of being a potential tool for orchard management with efficient technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS), Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS), Geographic Information System (GIS), Remote sensing, Variable Rate Technology, Soil sampling, Quality mapping, Yield mapping and monitoring, Augmented Reality in Integrative Internet of Things (ARIoT) through assessing, managing and evaluating the real time situation in the orchard. In order to address the persisting and upcoming challenges, the fruit production techniques need to be developed by precision farming.