Since the term precision farming is not as new as one might expect (see, e.g., the links at the end of the Wikipedia article on precision farming), the data I am working on has already been collected using methods of precision farming. There was one trial in 2003 for data collection and another one in 2004 for verification.

The collected attributes and amount of data are as mentioned in the last post. The farming variants that determine the amount of fertilizer are as follows:

• human decision, based on personal experience of farmer, without in-field variability (13% of data)
• human decision with smaller management zones (mapping, 30%)
• sensor decision, based on on-line sensor input from the field, uses decision rules that have been mined off-line (30%)
• nitrogen variation: progression of fertilizer amount to collect data (13%)
• no specific variant (14%)

Next will be a plan on how to construct MLPs from these data and test them. There might be some delay due to my teaching obligations in this year’s winter term.