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Regular use of digital tools in farming

By DLG

Digitalisation offers abundant opportunities for agriculture in production and contributes to meeting the requirements of society. Digitalisation offers possibilities for successfully combining productivity, animal friendliness, information management and sustainable use of natural resources. Requirement for the successful use of digital instruments is the digital competence of the users. It is met in most cases, especially in the young generation of farm. Now potential users have to be convinced of the benefits.

In many farms, digital tools are already regularly used to monitor and manage farm operations.

In Germany, herd management systems in pig and dairy farming as well as electronic field catalogues are already regularly used on many farms. In addition to the requirements of documentation, the accurate recording of application rates in arable farming also meets the requirements for an efficient profitability analysis of production.

A similar picture emerges in the US. The farm managers surveyed were also most likely to say that electronic field catalogues and herd management systems were regularly used. The main objective here is the more efficient use of farm inputs.

In the Netherlands, in addition to herd management systems, it is primarily farm management systems as a central instrument for farm management that are regularly used in a wide range of agricultural farms. Digital instruments are mainly used to collect data for the profitability analysis of production.

The use of field robots is less important in all the countries surveyed.