A GPS backpack system for mapping soil and crop parameters in agricultural fields

Farmers are having to gather increasing amounts of data on their soils and crops. Precision agriculture - the targeting of inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides according to locally determined ('metre-by-metre') requirements-is based on a knowledge of the spatial variation of soil and crop parameters across a field. The data has to be spatially located and GPS is an effective way of doing this. A backpack data logging system with GPS position tagging is described which has been designed to aid a farmer in the manual collection of data.