According to the new market research report by MarketsandMarkets, the Precision Farming Market is expected to grow from USD 7.0 billion in 2020 to USD 12.8 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 12.7%.
High demand for agricultural products
According to the researchers the high demand for agricultural products due to population growth, increased adoption of variable rate technology, remote sensing technology, and guidance technologies by worldwide farmers and strong government support for promoting the use of precision farming techniques are the major factors fuelling the growth of the precision farming market.
Changing weather patterns
Also, government initiatives in many countries such as the UK, the US, and India enable farmers to make use of optimised agricultural and technological tools to improve their production levels. Further, the changing weather patterns due to increasing global warming have impelled the adoption of advanced farming technologies to enhance farm productivity and crop yield.
Guidance technology
According to MarketsandMarkets guidance technologies were adopted on more than 80% of planted acres for several major crops in 2019 in North America. “The ease-of-use and advanced functionality of these systems are major factors for the higher adoption of this technology on farms across the world,” conclude the researchers.
Hardware segment to hold largest share
The hardware segment is expected to continue to hold the largest share of the precision farming market from 2020 to 2025. The growth of the market for hardware is attributed to the increasing adoption of automation and control devices such as drones/unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), GPS, irrigation controllers, guidance and steering systems, yield monitors, and sensors.
Increasing adoption of new technologies and advanced devices in precision farming is expected to drive the growth of the precision farming market for hardware.
Software
The precision farming market for software is expected to grow at the highest CAGR from 2020 to 2025. Increasing demand for AI-based data analytics is the major factor contributing to the highest CAGR of the market for software.
Yield monitoring
The report futher states that yield maps have grown in popularity in recent years as mapping programs on computer tablets have become easier to use. Yield monitoring is the most widely used application in precision farming as it plays a vital role in understanding field variability and helps farmers in maximising their yields.
According to the report, North and South America are expected to hold the largest share of the precision farming market during the forecast period: “The presence of large-sized farms in the US, Canada, and Brazil provides ideal environment for the adoption of agriculture technology. Countries such as the US and Canada in the Americas are the early adopters of precision farming technologies, which is the major reason for the high share of this region in the precision farming market. Farmers or growers in this region are increasingly adopting advanced farming systems and equipment such as steering and guidance systems, sensors, display devices, and farm management software.”
The current economic environment has left the agriculture industry spinning. Farmers are looking for ways to maximize profit in a market where input costs tend to exceed commodity pricing.
When money gets tight and concerns about revenue abound – or you simply want to streamline your business finances – it makes sense to tighten expenses by cutting unnecessary costs and optimizing your spending wherever possible.
Farmers realize that making one wrong decision can significantly impact their farm, so they are constantly looking for ways to minimize wasted time and resources to create a more profitable business. However, spending money on the right things can be a game-changer – and one of those things is precision farming technology.
The term precision farming means a series of strategies and tools that allow farmers to optimise and increase soil quality and productivity putting in place a series of targeted key interventions, a result that can be accomplished thanks to the introduction of increasingly advanced technologies.
It is referred to as “precision” because thanks to the state-of-the-art tools used, it is possible to perform the right intervention, in the right place, at the right time, responding to the specific demands of individual crops and individual areas of land with superior levels of precision.
Technologies are used, first and foremost, to collect the data and information required to make decisions on how to boost production and secondly to put in place the necessary corrective actions to achieve this goal.
Nowadays there is increasing talk about Agriculture 4.0, which is the evolution of the precision farming concept: this term refers to all the tools and strategies that use cutting-edge technologies in an interconnected manner starting with the use of data to improve and optimise production.
One of the most prominent concerns we hear when talking to farmers about purchasing precision ag technology is around cost and ROI. Many farmers believe their equipment is too old, that they are already experienced enough (or alternatively, are new enough that they don’t have the experience) or that they simply won’t get enough in return to make investments in precision ag a top priority – especially when they’re already saddled with extra costs and looming lower commodity prices.
Satellite crop monitoring is a tool that allows farmers to constantly monitor the health of their fields thanks to a multi-spectral imagery analysis of high-resolution satellite images and also promptly trigger any alarm bells.
An alternative solution, which does not involve the use of satellites, is agricultural drones. Nowadays they are mainly used for land mapping, but the most advanced versions adopt infrared sensors and imagery systems to detect problems that cannot be detected by the naked eye, just as satellites do.
Another important instrument for precision agriculture, which does not involve any intervention from above, are the environmental sensors installed in the fields, capable of recording climatic data and information on soil water requirements. Unlike the monitoring performed with satellites and drones, which are particularly useful for large areas of land, the advantage of the sensors is that they can also be used in enclosed spaces such as greenhouses and nurseries.
Thanks to all this data collected by satellites, drones, and sensors, it is possible to generate interactive maps that photograph the health state of the field and highlight any disparities between individual areas of crops clearly and swiftly; this also allows anomalies to be discovered and report the need for any specific interventions.
There are many causes for the criticalities in these areas: nutritional deficiencies, irrigation problems, localised parasitic attacks, damage due to hail or frost. To detect the reason for decreased vigour, it is necessary to conduct a field analysis which will be exceptionally well targeted thanks to all the information available.
Once the causes of the different yields in these areas have been identified, it will be possible to put in place targeted actions, depending on the problem, to plant seeds or spread variable rate fertilisers, or increase irrigation in certain areas, or adopt the use of phyto-pharmaceuticals where necessary.
In the medium to long term, the information on criticalities that repeat themselves each year, allows farm enterprises to plan structural investments, such as irrigation management or soil interventions much more efficiently.
The advantage of crop monitoring systems is that they allow farmers to accomplish constant control over even very large areas or even fields that are very far apart from each other, by setting a series of automated interventions (for example, to receive notifications when a given event occurs) that allow them to intervene in a timely manner, immediately identifying stress factors that are otherwise difficult to recognise. Without forgetting that, in addition to highlighting problem areas, constant monitoring allows farmers to verify the results of corrective actions put in place over time.
Farmers that have planted and harvested for years are experienced drivers, so it can be hard to see how precision farming technology will make a big enough difference to justify the cost. No matter how skilled you are, technology is always more accurate. Letting precision ag technology take the wheel also significantly reduces fatigue while you’re working in the tractor, which means you can spend your valuable mind space on other field activities.
