Overcoming Gaps and Bottlenecks to Advance Precision Agriculture.

Maintaining a clear understanding of the technology gaps, knowledge needs, and training bottlenecks is required for improving adoption of precision agriculture. As an industry, precision agriculture embraces tools, methods, and practices that are constantly changing, requiring industry, education, and research leaders to frequently reassess the current state and create a strategic vision of the future that provides clarity of challenges and opportunities. The presentation will address four key questions: 1) What environmental characterization (inputs for decision-support) are available from precision agriculture technology now and what “missing” information would provide the greatest benefit for decision-making? 2) What is needed to build improved decision support using precision agriculture and other “big data” sources? 3) What is the value added of precision agriculture relative to the goals of sustainable agriculture? and 4) What are the roles and responsibilities of publically-funded vs industry research and development?