Agro-processing News South Africa

Global precision farming market 2016 share, trend, segmentation and forecast to 2020

Precision agriculture involves systems, services, and activities that collect, monitor, track, manipulate and analyse data pertaining to agriculture and farming namely information about the soil, crop, water, climate, yield, nutrients and other environmental factors. More so, the technology primarily handles the variability in the above-mentioned factors. Precision agriculture not only ensures efficient use of resources, maximizes output and profitability, but also provides a sustainable solution to farm management practices.
Bob Nichols via
Bob Nichols via Wikimedia Commons

The global precision farming market which is projected to witness CAGR of 12.64% over the period 2014 to 2020, will cross $ 5.5 billion in total market value by the end of forecast period. The high growth in this sector is credited to growth in the agricultural industry, governmental incentives and subsidies, pressure for food crops due to a rise in population, the need to pay attention to crop health and crop yield in order to increase productivity, cost effectiveness and the recent integration of IT and Big Data analytics into agriculture.

The domain has some constraints such as high initial costs of investment, lack of technological skills, slow penetration of technology, unwillingness to adopt the latest technologies and lack of common standards for farming practices. The areas in precision farming that have the scope and are yet to be explored are many.

The APAC market that has yet to catch up with its growing demand for food crops, the anticipated growth in the Variable Rate Applications (VRA) market, opportunities in the application of drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in precision farming practices and the growing environmental issues are some of the areas of opportunities.

Read the full article on Agri Africa.

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