Jaime Cuauhtemoc Negrete

Independent researcher on issues of agricultural mechatronics, Graduate in Agrarian Autonomous Antonio Narro University, Postgraduate in Faculty of Agronomy Eliseu Maciel of UFPel, Brazil
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Horticulture, 2017, Vol. 7, No. 10   doi: 10.5376/ijh.2017.07.0010
Received: 28 Mar., 2017    Accepted: 30 Mar., 2017    Published: 10 May, 2017

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Negrete J.C., 2017, Precision agriculture in Mexico; current status and perspectives, International Journal of Horticulture, 7(10): 75-81 (doi: 10.5376/ijh.2017.07.0010)

Precision agriculture is not for big agriculture properties only, studies have demonstrated that by using precision agricultural techniques, the increase in yields remain proportionate between large and small plots of land. Additionally, with a significant decrease of the price of technology, precision agriculture is little by little becoming affordable even to smallholder farmers. In Mexico it is urgent to apply precision agriculture techniques due to the fact the pressure for food production, and the poverty desperate situation of small farmers, although there is the pretext that the machinery and equipment used in this technology is too expensive. Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) play a key role in precision agriculture: for instance, by integrating GPS (Global Positioning System) and wireless technology into production processes, farmers are able of knowing the exact the amount of fertilizer, water, etc., needed for each portion of land, so to maximize the yield per acre, thereby exists the possibility of using smart phones in the country because there is a growth of 52.6 million smartphones in 2014. Likewise  is feasible to use Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Anonymous, 2014). Since the country already exists company that manufactures the equipment so that eventually increases the usability of these increasingly larger amount. In this paper highlights that in the country there is no interest in precision agriculture, but it is possible to reverse this situation if the lines of research are promoted on the issue by the schools of mechatronics to undergraduate, master's and doctoral degrees, as they are more than 100, in support of the four schools that have precision agriculture formal courses.

Agriculture; Mexico; Mechatronics; Smart phones; Unmanned aircraft systems