Review of precision agriculture development situations in the main countries in the world and suggestions for China

It is needed to solve the problems such as relatively low input-output ratio and environmental pollution for Chinese agriculture, with the large amount of agricultural production and consumption. In the background of changing international situation and frequent natural disasters, transforming traditional agricultural production methods in China is an urgent. Driven by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, internet of things, cloud platform, automatic control, and new generation communication and so on, precision agriculture came out and was undoubtedly an effective way. Precision agriculture has become a common choice for developing sustainable and high-yield agriculture around the world. In order to obtain the development orientation of precision agriculture and successful practices in the world, this paper reviews the studies on precision agriculture developing status. The aim of this paper is to refine the experiences of precision agriculture developing in the main developed countries and regions and take a look at the precision agriculture development in China. Adopting the method of systematic literature analyzing and summary, Section 1 studies the development status of precision agriculture in the main developed countries and regions, such as America, Japan, European Union and Israel. The idea of precision agriculture was first proposed in America. Until today, America has developed mature precision agriculture system, which benefits from the highly developed technologies. Considering the serious contradiction between large population and less farmland, during 1970s, Japan took measures of consolidating farmland on a large scale and building farmland infrastructure and so on to improve the agricultural production conditions. The agricultural community was also formed to operate collaboratively the agricultural production. The development of precision agriculture in European Union is driving by digital technologies. The water-saving agriculture represented by drip-irrigation and sprinkler-irrigation has made remarkable results in Israel. The development experiences of precision agriculture in the main developed countries and regions enlighten us that: 1) the leading by government is the key; 2) the informatization construction is the foundation; 3) the advanced technology is the core; 4) the cultivation of new type of farmers is the guarantee. Section 2 analyzed the basements and weaknesses for developing precision agriculture in China. The weaknesses are the emphasis in this section. First, the farmland in China is scattered and the infrastructure is not perfect. Taking the informatization perspective, even though number of agriculture related information systems exist, the data and information are not interoperable between these systems. Second, at the present stage, we cannot acquire the temporal and spatial continuous agricultural information due to the rarity domestic satellite data and ground sensors for agriculture monitoring. Third, automatic variable operating system and equipment are lacking since the technology integration of information technology, communication and agricultural machine has not been achieved. Fourth, insufficient high-quality agricultural talents. Facing these weakness and Chinese conditions, Section 3 provided five suggestions to develop precision agriculture in China. Firstly, our government should overall plan and give guarantee in police making, infrastructure construction and financial support, etc. Secondly, we should improve the agricultural production condition through expanding moderately the operating scale of farmland and constructing the field infrastructure net and the national agricultural information platform. Thirdly, the key technology research, such as the information retrieval using remote sensing and technology integration of communication, automatic controlling, spatial information and smart machinery must be focused. Fourthly, the new type of personnel in agricultural field can be cultivated. Fifthly, pilot demonstration can be carried out according to the regional difference.