Instrumented citrus production.

摘要

Despite the notable technological support that has made Precision Agriculture feasible around the world, there are still opportunities for the development of instrumentation and automation in this area. These opportunities are more plentiful considering perennial crops and the traceability of agricultural products. Precision Agriculture has been developed more intensively for grains, which gives more opportunity for the development of technological tools for site-specific management of perennial crops, like citrus. Besides, the traceability of fruits is an immediate and strategic necessity in order to face non-economical issues for exporting, like phytosanitary measures. Therefore, for developing countries like Brazil, it is very important to development technologies to identify the origin and history of fruit in the market chain for its major exporting products. For the last five years, at the Embrapa Agricultural Instrumentation Center in Brazil, some of these opportunities have been explored in order to start the development of an information system and associated tools to make possible the integration of traceability and the site-specific management system for perennial crops. The use of sensors, fixed and on-board instrumentation, wired and wireless networks, and advanced methodologies have been applied for precision agriculture and traceability for citrus. The main problems that have been studied are: phytosanitary control, spraying control, automation of fertigation, and evaluation of product quality.