Which are the technologies of tomorrow in precision agriculture (PA)?
In order to create a course on PA coherent with the technological trends, the partnership of Sparkle project have dedicated a big part of the second Work Package to gather preparatory information for the creation of learning contents on the analysis of technology. In particular, Erre Quadro has performed (and just completed) a foresight analysis on PA.
Based on data obtained analysing several thousands of patents, we have reconstructed the technological environment of PA in arable crops, performed a cluster analysis on the technologies and analysed their trends: the results are shown in the next graphs.
The first diagram shows a comparison between normalized temporal distributions of each technological cluster retrieved in arable crops; in the subsequent graph a linear regression have been performed in the temporal window 2005-2015 in order to be able to contrast the trends.
All the analysed technological clusters have a growing tendency, confirming that precision agriculture is a hot topic at the moment, especially in arable crops. The fastest growing technological clusters, the ones on which companies and research centres are dedicating their commitment, are “planting/soil working”, “irrigation/fertigation” and “data transfer”.