Economic Impact of Precision Farming Technology

India needs to step up its fruits and vegetable production significantly to ensure adequate supply of these important food items for its fast-increasing population. Currently, however, the productivity of fruits and vegetables in India is low due to land, water, and technological and marketing problems. Precision farming is one of the recent technologies, which is implemented in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, with a main focus on increasing the productivity of fruits, vegetable and flowers. Among the vegetables, tomato is an important crop both in terms of its area in the State as well as its importance in the food preparations of the people of India. It is important to assess the technical efficiency of precision and non-precision (conventional) farming and also to compare the profitability of the tomato cultivation is essential, so as to recommend the precision farming technology for wider adoption at national level. Our study reveals that the net returns realized per ha of tomato under precision farming technology (Rs. 240,455) was found to be 300 percent higher than that of non-precision technology (Rs. 82,600). The yield gap analysis revealed that about 40 per cent of the difference in yield between precision and non-precision farming is due to the use of advanced technology. The results of frontier production function analysis reveal that the coefficients were significantly related with explanatory variables in precision farming and also the mean technical efficiency of precision farming was 93 per cent when compared to nonprecision, conventional farming method (78 per cent). Hence, precision farming is both economically and technically more efficient than the conventional, non-precision farming technology. The precision farming model promoted along with other connected services such as credit, insurance and marketing is replicable in other areas as well.