Precision farming paves the way to cheaper food

The agriculture industry today is faced with many challenges, primarily due to the phenomenal growth in our world population that is disproportional to agricultural land resources which are vital to our food supplies. It is estimated that our world population continues to grow at an average of 80 million people per year, leading to a reduction in available arable land that has added pressure on the industry to maximise its crop production using smaller areas zoned for agricultural purposes. Furthermore, as highly populated regions such as Asia continue to improve their purchasing power, the consumption of luxury foods such as meats increases, and in turn intensifies the demand pressure placed on crop production. This high demand coupled with limited food production ultimately leads to higher prices.

In order to fulfil global food needs and keep prices for food at a minimum, higher crop productivity per area is essential. The use of plant nutrients plays an important role to ease the burdens placed on food production as it helps farmers yield more crops without adversely affecting the environment. This target of environmentally-clean crop production at higher volumes can be achieved by implementing the principle of precision farming.

What is precision farming?

In the field of fertilisation, precision farming is the process by which the right amount of plant nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphate, and potash is added to an agricultural field containing different growth conditions. Using precise measures of fertiliser to the crops helps farmers to better understand how to maximise the performance of the fertiliser, which also leads to a positive impact on the environment as fertilisation is limited to the crops’ actual need. Our challenge in the future is to thus improve higher crop yields via an environmentally-friendly approach which will meet society’s expectations for cheap and healthy food.

Borealis is a producer of high quality fertilisers who promotes the use of the N-Tester in precision farming. The N-Tester is a small device that detects the amount of nitrogen needed by wheat, barley, rye and triticale (a feed grain). Within a few minutes, the farmer is capable of detecting how much nitrogen the plant needs at the time of fertilisation, hence avoiding excessive or deficient fertilisation.

The N-Tester measures the chlorophyll-content in the crop’s leaves which is an indicator of how much nitrogen has been taken up by the plant at the time of measurement. After measuring 30 leaves of plants in the crop field, the N-Tester automatically calculates an average that indicates the amount of nitrogen nutrition that is still needed. 

Value added services to Austrian Agriculture

In addition, Borealis also provides access to an online database which stores information that has been gathered by the Austrian farming community since 2002.  Some 100 N-Testers regularly collect data about the nitrogen nutrition of grain in the region. The measured results are then stored in a database and are used to generate reports on nitrogen demand in the region from where they came. As a result, Borealis can provide solid advice to our customers on fertilising recommendations for the different regions in Austria.