Higher agricultural productivity is a key to meeting growing global demand for food, writes Yangxuan Liu, a doctoral candidate in agricultural economics at Purdue, in a blog on how improved technology could help small-scale farmers and the high-value crops they often grow. “Unlike cereal crops, even the slightest problem can negatively impact yields and profitability …. Producers must vigilantly monitor pest and diseases to mitigate production and financial risk to these high-value crops,” says the blog at Global Harvest Initiative.
Liu’s research is focused on high-value crops such as vegetables — they are important to small growers but receive less attention than the major field crops in terms of precision agriculture, which coordinates seed, fertilizer and pest management with weather and the yield potential of cropland.
“Late blight disease may perhaps be the most economically damaging pathogen for potatoes and tomatoes, especially due to its sensitivity to weather,” says Liu, but growers may have difficulty monitoring the weather or judging the risk of a blight outbreak. A late blight decision-support system developed by Cornell “is a good example of how precision farming technology transforms data into information and then converts information into useful knowledge to help farmers make decisions.” The system gives growers an early warning of conditions favoring blight so they can schedule timely application of a fungicide at the proper rates. The result is higher potato yields and revenue for U.S. growers. “With proper support, this technology can easily be brought to developing countries,” wrote Liu.