Efficient agriculture water use is of crucial importance for water resources management. Consequently, accurately determining evapotranspiration (ET) is the first step for improving irrigation efficiency and productivity and for quantifying the ecosystem water balance. Several approaches for determining ET have been proposed in literature, but the relation between high and low spatial resolution methods still remains unresolved in irrigation studies and water management planning.

Automated Weeder Separates Friend from Foe. Friday, February 20, 2015 New technology being developed by the University of California – Davis is putting precision weed control onto farm equipment, which will eliminate the need for much of today’s manual labor. This is not your granddad’s weed whacker.

PhD: Self-guided drones for tracking irrigation in a cotton field

This project uses hyperspectral sensors to look at nutrients in the landscape. The ultimate goal is to be able to evaluate fertiliser requirements in hill country without having to do traditional soil and pasture testing. This project is under a "Primary Growth Partnership" (PGP) with Ravensdown and Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) New Zealand. The Pioneering to Precision programme, led by Ravensdown, seeks to improve fertiliser practice on hill country farms through remote sensing of the nutrient status of the farms and precision application of fertiliser.

Objectives 1.To develop a novel application for smartphones to capture on-farm ketosis monitoring data. The app will be designed to work on android phones and i-phone/i-pads. The app will allow collection of data for the three most common testing modalities (urine, milk, and blood ketones).

The project goal is to create an infrastructure that will permit to evaluate data in precision livestock farming along the value chain with the stages breeding/piglet production, fattening, and slaughterhouse across farms, farming branches, applications and standards. This includes data from external sources, e.g. on veterinary medical products and feed stuff. The results of the project are generic semantic models, which describe data independent of their syntactic structure and thus allow to easily convert data between different formats of representation.

Producing the highest quality crop with a maximized yield requires the real-time measurement and actionable analysis of a large number of plant-related external factors. These factors are meteorological, geological, organic and human-related. Measuring and processing these parameters is at the core of any decision-support system intending to streamline the production of farmlands. Currently there are no solutions available that can quantify all on-site plant-related parameters in real-time.

Mobile Nitrogenous Gas Sensor for Air Quality, Breeding, and Farming applications The objective of M3GA project is the development of a novel miniaturized tool to measure trace concentrations of nitrous oxide (N2O) and ammonia (NH3) in the air on to be used to monitor and manage of ventilation in livestock buildings or to monitor emissions from agriculture. The control of N2O and NH3 emissions from agriculture is becoming a great challenge for the next years: in France agriculture and farming account for more than 90% of the N2O and NH3 emissions.

The Sun Agri 2B project involves the design and study of dynamic systems agricultural photovoltaics system to resolve land use conflicts between food and energy production.

IDFS project aims to develop a new sensor system for providing information on water requirements of plants. This system will be integrated to an existing robot, used for weed control: Anatis.

CAP'INOV The project, led by the young company INOZY, aims to develop a permanent system of sensors located on the vines, for taking continuous measurements on the water and mineral status of the plant, without implementation destructive measurements.

The project involves the development of new crop suited in nurseries and vineyards to significantly reduce the impact of diseases. The proposed ADVANTAGE protection strategy is based on combinations of protection products or techniques and also on decision-support tools. These may be based on image processing techniques and/or molecular modeling tools.

The project is focusing the effort to reduce inputs in vineyards. By using new biostimulants based marine algae or plants capable of improving the efficiency of stimulators natural defenses; By developing an embedded imaging processing systems to track the effects of these bio-stimulants and stimulators of natural defenses of plants; By developing a spraying system to optimize their application.

To fight the development of golden flavescence the DAMAV project aims to develop an automated testing solution vine diseases rollover parcels via a micro-drone. The objective is to provide a turnkey tool for winemakers to allow the search for potential outbreaks, and more generally, any type of disease detectable vine foliage. To enable this diagnosis, the partners propose to study the foliage with a drone and a multispectral high-resolution camera.

The project is part of the strategic and economic context of precision farming. The objective is to maximize farmers revenue by minimizing the environmental impact of agricultural practices. One of the idea is to modulate practices in intra-plot level. The main technical obejctive is to develop a long-range drone imaging system and the image processing algorithms and associated agronomic models to supply the tools for decision system needed to implement precision agriculture crop Wheat, Maize, Sunflower and Rapesee.