This paper presents a unified framework that will facilitate the implementation of future autonomous farming systems. It describes the coordination of information flow between what is called precision autonomous farming and Precision Agriculture. Precision Agriculture aims to fulfill the agronomical needs of the crop growth. Precision autonomous farming addresses the operation, guidance and con...

Trends in the evolution and development of agricultural field machinery are often shaped by the technological development in other sectors of the world’s economy such as defense and transportation. For example, without defense-related concerns over locating troop movements or guiding ordinates, it is doubtful that the civilian sector alone would have provided enough justification for space-base...

Ministry of the Flemish Community, Agricultural Research Centre, Department of Animal Product Quality and Transformation Technology, Brusselsesteenweg 370, 9090 Melle, Belgium Laboratory of Agricultural Machinery and Processing, Department of Agro-Engineering and Economics, Catholic University Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 30, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium Laboratory of Food Microbiology and Food Prese...

We developed a single-equation decomposed negative binomial regression model (NBRM) of the U.S. farm sector to simultaneously evaluate structural changes in the U.S. agricultural sector and the strength of several economic forces that influenced the changes in farm structure during the 1960–96 period. We found all these forces reinforced economic incentives to increase the size and decrease the...

New technologies have a potential to contribute to achieving significant economic, social and environmental benefits in agriculture sector. However, the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have encountered some difficulties among farmers. This paper reports investigations on the adoption of ICT in agriculture among Italian tractors users and explores their opinions on t...

Article history: Received 28 February 2011 Received in revised form 13 July 2011 Accepted 8 August 2011 Available online 19 September 2011 This paper investigates the endogenous linkages between farmers' machinery investment decision and off-farm employment in China. Both the theoretical model and the empirical results based on a survey of 453 households in Anhui Province indicate that agricult...