Exploring the adoption of precision agricultural technologies: a cross regional study of EU farmers

The prescient need for sustaining soil quality to maintain and extend productivity potential, whilst simultaneously supporting a range of ecosystems services, makes precision farming a possible pathway for meeting global ambitions towards food security (Gebbers and Adamchuck, 2010; Telabpour et al., 2015). Precision agricultural technologies (PATs) are a set of technologies that are aimed at the management of in-field heterogeneity (Stafford, 2000; Fountas et al., 2005; Reichardt and Jürgens, 2009; Aubert et al., 2012). A range of benefits have been aligned with the uptake of PATs and these have focused on improved resource use productivity, reduced input usage and cost, in particular labour and management time, with wider associated benefits from targeted application of agrochemicals and nutrients (Godwin et al. 2003; Silva et al., 2011; Kinred et al., 2015; Smith et al. 2013; Eory et al. 2015; Schimmelpfennig, 2016). PATs have been in development for the last 3 decades, since the commercialisation of global positioning systems and we can identify four differing technological hierarchies of PATs.