Making precision agriculture (PA) pay on any farm is not a certainty.

Despite PA promising a revolution in agriculture, only five per cent of graingrowers and two per cent of mixed farmers had adopted the technology by 2000, five years after it first became available in Australia.

At the Grains Research & Development Corporation-supported 2004 Western Australia (WA) No Till Farmers Association conference, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems researcher Peter Stone blamed uncertainty for farmers not adopting the technology.

“Understandably, many farmers are reluctant to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a system until they know it will be profitable.

“And, unfortunately, it will not be easy to get the evidence to show that PA is profitable unless more people invest in it and use it,” he said.

Dr Stone, however, suggested this “vicious circle” could be broken, or at least weakened, by growers using a simple investment analysis to determine if PA would be viable on their farm. 

“Growers need to realise the benefits as quickly as possible, as delays in getting benefits can cost serious money,” he stressed.

Calculations varied for every farm and growers should assess potential benefits against costs before adopting the technology.

Factors to consider include: current cropping gross margin; investment cost of PA; time lapse before benefits began and maximum benefits were received; timeframe over which the technology can be employed; annual fees required to keep using the technology; area cropped.

“For a typical WA wheat farm, investing in PA is only likely to make a profit if the gross margin for PA-managed crops can be increased by three to six per cent every year, compared with non-PA-managed crops,” Dr Stone said.

Farmers wanting to make money from PA had to assess how these gross margins could be reached on their farms.

“They should then match their expenditure on equipment with the expected gross margin gains and use it over a large area, spreading the costs and multiplying the benefits readily,” Dr Stone said.