Precision farming creates a buzz as growers try new technology
Adrone flies over the orchard. The small robot, loaded with sensors and cameras, moves in a grid pattern high above the trees. It picks up things the human eye cannot see: the nutrient content of trees, the health of the soil, how much water there is in parts of the orchard. With this information, farmers can tell which areas of their farms need watering, which need fertiliser — and they can estimate yields. Precision farming could be the future in SA, farmers and technology specialists say. Agriculture in the last quarter helped pull the country out of a technical recession and contributed 0.7 percentage points to the 2.5% GDP growth in the second quarter. But until the first quarter of 2017, agriculture’s GDP contribution had been declining since the end of 2014. Declining farming profit-ability and water scarcity — drought, declining rainfall or overdemand for water — has left SA with less than two-thirds of the number of farms it had in the early 1990s, the World Wildlife Fund s...
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