Precision Agriculture Demands a New Approach to Soil and Plant Sampling and Analysis—Examples from Australia

Abstract Much effort goes into ensuring that soil and plant testing laboratories provide clients with analytical results that are accurate, reliable, and therefore, reproducible. In contrast, much less effort appears to be expended on ensuring that the analyses undertaken provide information that is useful and appropriate to the task of soil, crop, and land management; the benefit of soil and plant analysis is often simply assumed. This article presents some examples from Australia of laboratory‐independent constraints to soil and plant testing. It is argued that for the soil and plant testing industry and its underpinning science to be credible, the lessons provided by precision agriculture must be heeded. Precision agriculture demands a much greater focus on the characterisation of soil and crop heterogeneity than has occurred hitherto, which in short, means that greater numbers of samples need to be analyzed. In turn, this means that cheap, rapid surrogates for traditional analytical methodologies are required. It also means that just as crop management will need to be site specific, so too will the interpretation of the results of soil and plant analysis and the associated development of management recommendations.