Applications of precision agriculture in horticultural crops

to reduced costs and environmental impact. Because the practise provides record trail, enhanced traceability of farm activities can be obtained that consumers and administration increasingly require (Stafford, 2000; Bellon-Maurel et al., 2014). PA is a cyclic system. The steps can be divided into data collection and localisation, data analysis, management decisions on applications, evaluation of management decisions; and then a new cycle starts. Each year, data are stored in a database and are used as historical data for future decisionmaking (Fountas et al., 2006; Gebbers and Adamchuk, 2010). All this large amount of potentially spatio-temporal data gathered using PA applications is leading to the ‘big data’ concept that will require optimized algorithms to extract the hidden knowledge and relations among variables. Modern PA has a rather short history. Its application started over the last twenty-five years, when global positioning systems (GPS) and yield monitors were made available in field crops. Harvesting was mechanised and sensors were placed on harvesting machines to measure the spatial distribution of yield continuously. Applications started in cereals using impact or γ-ray grain flow sensors. When first yield monitors were developed and yield maps were created, it was shown that yield and soil properties varied highly within the field. This fact marked the development of modern PA (Hedley, 2015). However, applications in fruit and vegetables German Society for Horticultural Science