Modern agriculture professionals are striving to use innovative technology to increase their profits, reduce the need for manual labor on their farms, lower operational costs, and make the farm easier to manage overall. One technique that allows farmers to significantly improve the way they run their operations is farm mapping. In this article, we will talk about this technique in detail, discuss its benefits, and explain what technology you will need to implement farm mapping.
What is farm mapping?
Farm mapping is a precision agriculture technique that allows farmers to create detailed maps of their property. These maps usually contain land boundaries, locations of buildings, fences, gateways, and water pipes located on a farm. Farmers can also record the crops planted in different sections of their fields and details of operations that were carried out in those fields. Farmers can also use agriculture drones, weather monitoring stations, moisture sensors, soil monitoring technology, and other precision farming devices to record even more information about their land and crops on field maps.
What technology is used for farm mapping?
Farm mapping software
Farm mapping computer software and mobile apps can be used to actually create field maps. For instance, the FieldBee app allows you to import field data in the .SHP format, upload cadaster documents, and even draw field boundaries manually using Google Maps.
Agriculture drones
Agriculture drones can be used to assess the condition of your land and drops in your fields remotely.
Satellite imagery
Just like agriculture drones, satellite imagery can provide accurate information regarding the condition of your crops without requiring you to go out into the fields to monitor them. You can also use satellite images to monitor how the condition of crops changes in response to fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide application, and changes in irrigation.
Moisture sensors
Remote moisture sensors connected to a farm mapping app can automatically show farmers which sections of their fields need an increase or decrease in irrigation.
Soil analysis devices
It’s not a secret that different parts of the same field can have completely different soil. With farm mapping, farmers can analyze different parameters of the soil in various sections of their fields and then record those parameters on field maps, making it easy to take those differences into account during future agriculture procedures.
Final thoughts about farm mapping
As you can see, farm mapping is an extremely versatile technique that can be used to improve many assets of your farming operation. Whether you’re simply creating records of your field operations or implementing advanced precision farming techniques that utilize soil sensors and drones, you will definitely need a good farm mapping app to keep track of all the information.