Precision Agriculture is becoming ever more relevant as the agricultural industry struggles to come to terms with the environment, economics, traceability, vehicle guidance and crop management. Whilst some benefits have proved elusive, others contribute positively to today’s agriculture. Research continues to be necessary and needs to be reported and disseminated to a wide audience. These proceedings contain the reviewed papers from the 7th European Conference on Precision Agriculture. The papers reflect the wide range of disciplines that impinge upon precision agriculture including remote sensing, plant disease and weed detection, yield monitoring, soil sensing, geo statistics and path planning, regional and crop modelling, cooperation and guidance of robots, precision application, ICT in precision agriculture, future farming and European relevance for precision agriculture. The broad range of research topics reported is a valuable resource for researchers, advisors, teachers and professionals in agriculture. Also note that the reviewed papers from the 4th European Conference on Precision Livestock Farming are presented in a companion publication.

Precision livestock farming is becoming ever more relevant as the agricultural industry struggles to come to terms with aspects such as animal welfare, animal disease, the environment, economics, traceability, robots and livestock management. Whilst some benefits have proved elusive, others contribute positively to today's agriculture. Research continues to be necessary and needs to be reported and disseminated to a wide audience. These proceedings contain the reviewed papers from the 4th European Conference on Precision Livestock Farming. The papers reflect the wide range of disciplines that impinge upon precision livestock farming including feeding dairy, data quality, poultry and pig applications, livestock environment, wireless sensing, dairy fertility and calving management, animal identification, mastitis detection and locomotion. The broad range of research topics reported are a valuable resource for researchers, advisors, teachers and professionals in agriculture. Also note that the reviewed papers from the 7th European Conference on Precision Agriculture are presented in a companion publication.

Precision agriculture (PA) involves the application of technologies and agronomic principles to manage spatial and temporal variation associated with all aspects of agricultural production in order to improve crop performance and environmental quality. The focus of this book is to introduce a non-specialist audience to the the role of PA in food security, environmental protection, and sustainable use of natural resources, as well as its economic benefits. The technologies covered include yield monitors and remote sensing, and the key agronomic principles addressed are the optimal delivery of fertilizers, water and pesticides to crops only when and where these are required. As a result, it is shown that both food production and resource efficiency can be maximized, without waste or damage to the environment, such as can occur from excessive fertilizer or pesticide applications. The authors of necessity describe some technicalities about PA, but the overall aim is to introduce readers who are unfamiliar with PA to this very broad subject and to demonstrate the potential impact of PA on the environment and economy. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

Precision agriculture is now 'main stream' in agriculture and is playing a key role as the industry comes to terms with the environment, market forces, quality requirements, traceability, vehicle guidance and crop management. Research continues to be necessary and needs to be reported and disseminated to a wide audience. This book contains peer reviewed papers presented at the 9th European Conference on Precision Agriculture, held in Lleida, Spain. The papers reflect the wide range of disciplines that impinge on precision agriculture: technology, crop science, soil science, agronomy, information technology, decision support, remote sensing and others. The broad range of research topics reported will be a valuable resource for researchers, advisors, teachers and professionals in agriculture long after the conference has finished.

The aim of this book is to bring together a series of contributions from experts in the field to cover the major aspects of the application of geostatistics in precision agriculture. The focus will not be on theory, although there is a need for some theory to set the methods in their appropriate context. The subject areas identified and the authors selected have applied the methods in a precision agriculture framework. The papers will reflect the wide range of methods available and how they can be applied practically in the context of precision agriculture. This book is likely to have more impact as it becomes increasingly possible to obtain data cheaply and more farmers use onboard digital maps of soil and crops to manage their land. It might also stimulate more software development for geostatistics in PA.

Sensing Approaches for Precision Agriculture aims to bring together the ‘state of the art’ of the most popular sensing techniques and the current state of research on the application of sensors in Precision Agriculture (PA). Sensing is of great value in PA because it provides cheap and immediate data for management. This book gives a broad overview of sensing in PA and a coherent introduction for new professionals and research scientists. Readers are introduced to the potential applications of a range of different sensors, how they should be used properly and their limitations for use in PA. Chapters on specific topics and case studies provide depth and enable implementation of the methods by users. A general introduction about sensing techniques in PA is followed by Chapters 2–9 on the most important specific techniques in sensing and Chapters 10–13 include mini-case studies, each showing cutting-edge applications for different sensing methods. Finally, there is an Epilogue on how we expect sensors and analysis to develop.

High yields and environmental control in crop farming call for precise adaptations to local growing conditions. Treating large fields in a uniform way by high capacity machinery cannot be regarded as a sustainable method for many situations. Because differences existing within single fields must be considered. The transition from former field work carried out manually or by small implements to present-day high-capacity machinery caused that the farmers lost the immediate and close contact with soils and crops. However, modern sensing and controlling technology can make up for this deficit. High tech methods that include proximal sensing and signals from satellites can provide for controls that allow adjusting farming operations to small fractions of one ha and sometimes even down to some m2, hence in a site-specific mode. This applies to operations for soil cultivation, sowing, fertilizing and plant protection. This book deals with site-specific concepts, applications and results.

Food chain management research can help in the analysis and redesign of value creation and the product flow throughout the chain from primary producer down to the consumer. The aim is to meet consumer and societal requirements effectively at minimal cost. In the Wageningen UR strategic research program, Agrologistics and Supply Chains (2005-2009), a large number of Wageningen UR research institutes were involved in multi-disciplinary and applied research projects in order to shed light on diverse food supply chain management challenges such as, design of chain strategies, collaboration efficiencies between chain partners, management of risks in chains, innovative modeling concepts and application of information technologies. This book presents the results of this program. It offers a diverse disciplinary spectrum on food supply chains and it’s challenges in 15 chapters. It contributes considerably to the advancement of our knowledge on management and control of food supply chains.

This book gives an overview of applications of Machine Learning (ML) in diverse fields of biological sciences, including healthcare, animal sciences, agriculture, and plant sciences. Machine learning has major applications in process modelling, computer vision, signal processing, speech recognition, and language understanding and processing and life, and health sciences. It is increasingly used in understanding DNA patterns and in precision medicine. This book is divided into eight major sections, each containing chapters that describe the application of ML in a certain field. The book begins by giving an introduction to ML and the various ML methods. It then covers interesting and timely aspects such as applications in genetics, cell biology, the study of plant-pathogen interactions, and animal behavior. The book discusses computational methods for toxicity prediction of environmental chemicals and drugs, which forms a major domain of research in the field of biology. It is of relevance to post-graduate students and researchers interested in exploring the interdisciplinary areas of use of machine learning and deep learning in life sciences.

This report looks at farm management practices with green growth potential, from farmer-led innovations (such as those directly linked to soil and water, Integrated Pest Management, organic farming) to science-led technologies (such as biotechnology and precision agriculture).