EFFECTIVENESS OF PRECISION FARMING INFORMATION SYSTEMS IMPLEMENTATION IN AGRARIAN ENTERPRISES
Abstract
The article is devoted to investigating of the advantages of applying precision farming systems and to determining their economic efficiency in comparison with traditional methods of field cultivation. The urgency of this topic was confirmed on the basis of the analysis of a number of native and foreign publications which reveals the essence of precision farming technologies and describes the experience of implementing precision farming systems in different countries. The economic and system structural analysis as well as series of calculations were conducted based on the simulation of the most common technological operations of pre-planting soil cultivation. The main advantages of using parallel driving systems in comparison with traditional methods of field processing at different stages of cultivating crops due to the reduction of the width of overlap areas at least 15 cm at each run of the power machine are investigated. Such results can be achieved through the implementation of GPS monitoring, the use of RTK stations and autopilot, especially in the dark. By modeling a number of production processes of pre-sowing field treatment on the example of a conditional field of 1000 hectare an estimation of the economic efficiency of precision farming systems was made. Averaged data of real enterprises in the Poltava region (Ukraine) during sunflower cultivation was used for economic efficiency assessment. The obtained results demonstrate a sustainable economic effect in the application of even individual elements of precision farming and a short payback period of technical and software tools that need to be implemented in the first stage. The theoretical and economic considerations mentioned in the article can be easily transformed for farms of different sizes and can become additional arguments in favor of the introduction of precision farming systems in general and parallel driving systems in particular in various agrarian enterprises of Ukraine.
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