Reliable input measurements for PA

  Square meter scale precision agriculture requires input data to be on square meter level as well. Farmers are constantly approached by companies claiming to have the sensors required to do accurate measurements on this square meter level. This causes a problem consisting of two aspects. The first aspect concerns the measurement technique used. Many companies do not directly measure the required quantity but measure a surrogate, which is correlated to the to be measured quantity. Due to the rapid growth of measurement techniques and the disapearance of the arable farming marketing board in the Netherlands, farmers no longer have overview on which measurement techniques are reliable and which are not, taking into account their local conditions. There is a need for research in which these measurement techniques are compared to the real value, so that a reliability and accuracy score can be given to each measurement technique. An example is the different soil sampling methods available in the Netherlands.
The second aspect concerns the interpolation of data. Often data is ‘made up’ by means of interpolation to be able to provide farmers with a square meter scale measurement map. The question is which measurement resolution is required to make sure no variation is missed and thus evened out by the interpolation techniques. As this can vary over different areas in the Netherlands, there is a need for research in which guidelines for effective measurement per area are established.