MAR 13 2015
Contribution of monitoring systems for an agriculture closer to technologies - Part I
In the last decade, the agriculture sector in Portugal has revealed positive differences in many aspects, particularly in the value of imported agricultural products (in 2012 we produced around 70% of our consumption needs) and the number of active farmers and their basic training and age (according to the National Statistics Institute, currently have about 750 000 active farmers, of which 15 000 have fewer than 35 years old).
Agriculture is heading towards a future closer to technologies, anticipation and accuracy. Within the ICT solutions for this sector, the monitoring systems currently available are powerful tools and a means to realise the concept of agriculture of precision, which is the use of hardware (sensors) and/or software to assess, monitor and predict the conditions of a certain area of land.
The main objectives of these systems are contributing to the increase in production efficiency and reduce the environmental impact caused by the agricultural activity. By focusing in monitoring systems of environmental factors, we can divide them into four application areas: air, water, soil and crops. We address in this article the first area: the air.
Our main objective in the article published by Agrotec – Revista Técnico-Científica Agrícola, is to present some of the best examples of innovative technologies that are a result of I&I projects, both national and international.
For instance the VineRobot Project which proposes the design, development and deployment of a novel use-case agricultural robot under the scope of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV), and equipped with several non-invasive sensing technologies to monitor parameters such as grape yield, vegetative growth, vineyard water status and grape composition. Among other advantages, this solution is said to be low-cost. In the end, the goal is to offer the end users the ability to monitor their vines through a mobile application and desktop software.
Read the full article in Portuguese here!
