Agriculture Can Be Managed From Outer Space

HomeScience ReportsReports and NewsAgricultural and Forestry Science

Agriculture Can Be Managed From Outer Space

18.08.2003

The first attempt in the Russian Federation to utilize contemporary information technologies for efficient farm production management has been made. The decision-making support system for agricultural enterprises is being tested at a private agricultural farm in the Orenburg Province.

Information technologies, which formerly served solely space industry, can be employed to make agriculture more efficient. That has been done by the specialists of the GEOMIR Engineering Center in collaboration with the ILYINKA agroindustrial holding located in the Orenburg Province, ILYINKA being one of the largest private agricultural enterprises.

Quick and appropriate decision-making for farm production needs precise information about the environment status, meteorological conditions, crops status. A unique system developed by the GEOMIR specialists serves this purpose. The system utilizes the data of space shooting, aerial photography, digital mapping. The latest computer technologies summarize these data, process them and deliver them in the real-time mode to the executives of the agricultural enterprise to the regular planning meetings. The joint project started by GEOMIR and ILYINKA agroindistrial complex in April 2003 is called “Decision-Making Support System for Agricultural Enterprises”.

What decisions does the system help to make? “We have all required data on the status of the fields to plan the seeds consumption, fuel consumption and to decide which fields are ready for sowing based on the climatic conditions”, explains Pyotr Tobachenko, project manager on behalf of ILYINKA agroindistrial complex. Economists have calculated that availability of that kind of information will reduce agricultural production expenses by 15 percent and that will exceed the cost of the information system. The project is supposed to fully pay back within a year.

Data collection and analysis regarding the status of all farming elements will be performed by the situation center, which is being constructed now by the GEOMIR specialists to be put in commission in November 2003. Geoinformation data are delivered from satellites and light aircraft – balloons or motor hang-gliders. The shooting is performed within the sowing preparation, vegetation, ripening and harvesting periods. The shooting allows to evaluate germinating capacity of winter crops, to notice the signs of drought, formation and growth of ravines, soil erosion, salinization and swamping. On top of that, any emergency situations can be observed, such as conflagration, flooding, damages. If weather conditions do not allow to get high-quality space pictures, monitoring can be continued by balloons or motor hang-gliders equipped with digital photographic and video facilities. The data on machinery, warehouse, staff and other necessary information is entered into the system. After the data are processed and analyzed they are displayed on the multiple-access monitor in the situation center. Decisions made by the executives at the operative meetings are stored in the database and their utilization is automatically controlled.

Therefore, the agricultural enterprise starts to work in a new fashion. In addition to economic benefit, the enterprise quickly acquires the image of progressive farm, which increases competitiveness of its production in the market.

This project is one of the areas the specialists of GEOMIR Engineering Center are developing. They have extensive experience in developing space information technologies as GEOMIR was established in 2002 by a team of highly skilled professionals who had been employed earlier at ENERGIA (Energy) rocket and space complex. They manage the remote probing methods, which can be applied for diverse purposes: mapping, ecological monitoring, building construction and hydraulic work. “The presented project for farm production is part of the remote production business management system created by our specialists, says Professor Voronkov, Director General of GEOMIR. – Our future lies in the high-precision agriculture based on exact positioning of all objects”. The peculiarity of this particular project is that the information system has been ordered by a private customer.

Sergey Komarov | Informnauka
Further information:
http://www.Informnauka.ru

All articles from Agricultural and Forestry Science >>>

The most recent press releases about innovation >>>

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

Im Focus: Virus multiplication in 3D

Vaccinia viruses serve as a vaccine against human smallpox and as the basis of new cancer therapies. Two studies now provide fascinating insights into their unusual propagation strategy at the atomic level.

For viruses to multiply, they usually need the support of the cells they infect. In many cases, only in their host’s nucleus can they find the machines,...

Im Focus: Cheers! Maxwell's electromagnetism extended to smaller scales

More than one hundred and fifty years have passed since the publication of James Clerk Maxwell's "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" (1865). What would our lives be without this publication?

It is difficult to imagine, as this treatise revolutionized our fundamental understanding of electric fields, magnetic fields, and light. The twenty original...

Im Focus: Highly charged ion paves the way towards new physics

In a joint experimental and theoretical work performed at the Heidelberg Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, an international team of physicists detected for the first time an orbital crossing in the highly charged ion Pr⁹⁺. Optical spectra were recorded employing an electron beam ion trap and analysed with the aid of atomic structure calculations. A proposed nHz-wide transition has been identified and its energy was determined with high precision. Theory predicts a very high sensitivity to new physics and extremely low susceptibility to external perturbations for this “clock line” making it a unique candidate for proposed precision studies.

Laser spectroscopy of neutral atoms and singly charged ions has reached astonishing precision by merit of a chain of technological advances during the past...

Im Focus: Ultrafast stimulated emission microscopy of single nanocrystals in Science

The ability to investigate the dynamics of single particle at the nano-scale and femtosecond level remained an unfathomed dream for years. It was not until the dawn of the 21st century that nanotechnology and femtoscience gradually merged together and the first ultrafast microscopy of individual quantum dots (QDs) and molecules was accomplished.

Ultrafast microscopy studies entirely rely on detecting nanoparticles or single molecules with luminescence techniques, which require efficient emitters to...

Im Focus: How to induce magnetism in graphene

Graphene, a two-dimensional structure made of carbon, is a material with excellent mechanical, electronic and optical properties. However, it did not seem suitable for magnetic applications. Together with international partners, Empa researchers have now succeeded in synthesizing a unique nanographene predicted in the 1970s, which conclusively demonstrates that carbon in very specific forms has magnetic properties that could permit future spintronic applications. The results have just been published in the renowned journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Depending on the shape and orientation of their edges, graphene nanostructures (also known as nanographenes) can have very different properties – for example,...

All Focus news of the innovation-report >>>

Top

Send this article

Forum for Science, Industry and Business