By DOUG SCHMITZ

Iowa Correspondent

SELBYVILLE, Del. — The global precision agriculture market is expected to exceed $10 billion by 2024, according to a research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. of Selbyville.

“The precision farming market growth is attributed to growing emphasis on improving agricultural productivity owing to rapidly increasing population around the world,” the report stated. “Farmers in developed countries are rapidly adopting modern agricultural practices and equipment to boost their yield productivity and reduce agricultural losses.”

In addition, it said increasing popularity of cloud-based farm management systems to manage precision agriculture activities at scale is also largely contributing to the market growth. “Moreover, initiatives to modernize GPS infrastructure to enhance its location and positioning capabilities will also boost the precision agriculture market growth over the forecast period.”

Dave Miller, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation director of research and commodity services, noted the adoption of precision agricultural and digital agricultural technologies continues to move forward. For example, in Iowa, GPS-assisted tractors, sprayers and combines are becoming the norm rather than the exception.

“A significant portion of the Iowa corn crop is now planted with 16- to 24-row planters that utilize auto-steer, individual row monitoring and controls and precision technology on the seed metering,” he said. “A very large percent of the sprayers have global positioning system guidance and mapping technologies that help manage weed and pest control, as well as fertilizer application.

“Most combines put into service over the past 15 years have yield monitors and most have yield mapping capabilities,” he added. “These technologies are helping farmers reduce costs of materials, reduce overlaps and to increase yield and profits, while reducing nutrient losses and getting more efficiency from all inputs applied.”

The report said the hardware segment is expected to hold a majority share of the precision farming market by 2024, owing to large-scale installation of different precision devices such as sensors, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) antennas and receivers and increasing adoption of mobile devices for running precision farming mobile apps.

“Moreover, growing popularity of drones for aerial observations and field mapping applications is also expected to drive the hardware market growth between 2017-24,” the report said.

In addition, the sensors segment is projected to dominate the hardware market with more than 19 percent of the hardware share in hardware by 2024, due to increasing utility of different types of sensors for facilitating remote sensing applications in precision farming market systems.

“As farm management systems are being increasingly integrated with various sensor-based systems such as aerial sensors, ground-based sensors and satellite sensors to collect information regarding critical agricultural parameters,” the report stated, “the adoption of sensors is expected to exhibit positive growth during the forecast period.”

The managed services market will also exhibit exponential growth between 2017-24 due to growing popularity of cloud computing technology: “As the technology allows highly-scalable deployment and management of precision farming systems over cloud networks, growers are expected to rapidly adopt these services in order to increase the efficiency of their precision farming operations.”

According to the report, the high precision positioning system market is projected to hold a significant share of the precision agriculture market between 2017-24 as GPS systems serve as the backbone for these operations. “Due to the effective capabilities to collect accurate location and positioning information, the technology facilitates timely management of precision farming functions for enhancing overall yield productivity.

“On the other hand, remote sensing applications will witness accelerated adoption over the forecast period due to consistent technological advancements in sensor technology and new product development initiatives by the market players.”

Weather monitoring applications will dominate the precision farming market during the forecast timeline, as they provide key information related to important parameters such as moisture levels, relative humidity levels, rainfall and wind direction.

“Unlike other industries, farm production is most affected by weather conditions and hence, the adoption of these solutions for effective weather monitoring will witness consistent growth over the forecast period,” the report said.

Globally, the Asia-Pacific precision agriculture market is projected to exhibit fastest growth between 2017-24 because of favorable initiatives being undertaken in countries such as India, China and Japan to improve sustainable agricultural productivity and food security.

“To support the increasing population in the subcontinent, advanced technologies are being increasingly explored and implemented for improving farm productivity and optimizing resource costs,” the report said. “Also, favorable government initiatives are largely contributing to the growing adoption of digital farming market practices in the region.”