Why farmers in developing countries do not widely adopt the principles of precision agriculure despite developing simple tools and techniques that can be easily followed?
Because of the lack of knowledge and fear from the beginning of the experiment. Besides, the lack of sufficient guide fields to change their cultures.
The confidence level of the farmers in developing countries are not yet ready to accept fully the knowledge about Precision Agriculture. They are backward in Education, Technology and Financial etc are determined them to take more decisions to adopt Precision Agriculture.
@ Ali, because the investment cost is much higher while the savings are the same.
It is still weak because, for example, in the case of Mexico, nobody cares, neither the government in turn, nor the researchers, because it does not represent money and fast fame, they do not even know what it is, I have published an article about it and as if it did not exist, there is a article on the internet by some individuals from the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics. with an impressive CV and it is grotesque that they have no idea what it is about, nor about agricultural mechanization and less precision agriculture and dare to speak about what they do not know, then as if those who have to investigate about it those who have studies on the subject they do not do it and the government does not support them and requires them to do it, and those who want to go to the moon and do not know anything about agriculture talk about what they do not know, never in the case of Mexico will there be precision agriculture
Ali Mohamed It is a combination of several variables:
Ali Mohamed I think it is because some of the ingredients that reduce the risk and promote adoption are missing:
1) Hardware (service providers, financing, ...)
2) Software (financing, consulting...)
3) Connectivity
4) Adapted processes and technologies (research, human capital, ...)
5) People (Capacitation of farmers, services providers, researchers, ...; Sensibilize politicians)
6) Data (historical, other)
7) Agronomic knowledge (people, consulting, ...)
8) Pilot farms / Business cases
9) Networking
10)Time
The importance of each ingredient depends of the specific context (country, crop, etc.). In most cases the one with greatest domino effect is 5) because there are many low-cost approaches to PA.
As the concept of PA lies in "do the right thing, in the right place, in the right time
and in the right way (Finger, 2019).” Therefore PA can provide site-specific solutions and treat a farm heterogeneously. I agree PA is not well adopted in developing countries so there is a need to work on capacity development in the near future.
There was an interesting analysis of the potential of PA for smallholder farmers .. https://www.researchgate.net/project/Potential-of-Precision-Farming-in-Latin-America
Not only precision agriculture, it is always difficult to break old practices even though new options are better. This is partially because of passing on the practices being followed from generation to generation.