Precision Agriculture in Ontario: 2017 Precision Agriculture Services Dealership Survey

Agricultural service providers affiliated with the Ontario Agri Business Association (OABA) were surveyed on the extent to which their businesses use precision agricultural technologies for crop inputs purchased by farmers in Ontario. Approximately half of the fertilizers and pesticides sold by these companies are custom applied on land managed by the buyer of the inputs and nearly half of the respondents custom apply crop inputs on over 50,0000 acres. An indication of the wide spread use of precision agriculture in some form for crop production is that only 4% of respondents report not using precision agriculture at all within their business. The most popular use of the technology within the businesses and in their custom application services are GPS autosteer systems and precision spraying technology to minimize overlap and to ensure complete coverage. In addition to guidance systems, other geographic services widely used were the field mapping and soil sampling. Variable rate technologies are not adopted to the same extent as the geographic category of innovations but do hold promise. Many pieces of information ranging from geo-physical to climatic to production to economic are necessary to generate a prescription for the variable application of inputs to reap the benefits. The difficulty of constructing, collecting, maintaining and sharing data limit the opportunity to derive effective decision rules with high information value to producers. Enhancing the adoption of non-GPS precision agriculture technologies will require turning the vast amount of new data collected on crop production into manageable and valuable decisions for the farmer.