Chapter 7With the advent of site-specific crop management, sustainability and profitability, land
farming now requires information and technology-based management system to identify,
analyse and manage spatial and temporal resource variability. Th is approach is being made
increasingly possible by recent innovation in information technologies such as mobile
devices, geographic information systems, positioning technologies (such as Geographical
Position system), and Earth Observations. Such innovation now off ers a holistic approach
to micro-manage agricultural resources. (Robert et al., 1994).
Basic mapping and farm-level record keeping is one of the first precision agriculture
practices that must be implemented in a typical productive agriculture operation
(Stombaugh et al., 2001). Typical tasks include mapping of variations that occur in largescale
field features such as vegetation stress, crop rotation, inventorying, irrigation, soil
drainage and erosion, pest control, etc. Th e search for a low cost methodology that takes
into account the growth of information technology in data capture and surveying, data
processing, database creation and geographic information systems becomes mandatory in
order to respond to such needs.
Th e study constitutes, for the first time in Malta, the collection of high precision
farming statistics that makes use of an inexpensive system for aerial mapping that requires
minimal ground truthing. Th e effectiveness of such a method for small areas was later
demonstrated by Galdies and Borg (2006) related to coastal and beach management in
the Maltese islands. In the current case, digital aerial remote sensing enabled the accurate
mapping of agricultural variables, and coupled with ground survey data, resulted in
the production of precise, high resolution agricultural crop-cover maps. Additional
information can be further derived from this data that can be used for the optimisation of
micro agriculture practices.peer-reviewe
