Achieving sustainability in rice-wheat cropping system by precision farming

Abstract

Precision farming serves dual purpose of enhancing productivity and reducing ecological degradation. Precision farming emphasizes the sitespecific crop management practices considering the spatial variability of land in order to maximize crop production and minimize environmental damage. Precision farming technologies are being researched and implemented under various crops and cropping systems. Rice-wheat cropping system is most suitable for adoption of this concept for higher productivity and profitability. It is evident that, the precision farming technologies are successful in their role of enhancing crop production, input use efficiency while minimizing the cost of production and environmental impacts. Precision land leveling, precision planting, real time N application using LCC, SSNM, have demonstrated potentialities for improving crop yields, water productivity and nutrient use efficiency and the other technologies like use of sensors, remote sensing etc are being evaluated for their potential use under real farming situation.