An Alternative Approach to Managing the Nitrogen Content of Cereal Crops

Fertilizers are actively used in agriculture, and nitrogen is a main introduced agrochemical for cereal crops. It's necessary to study crops nitrogen status managing approaches by determining reasonable doses of fertilizer applied. The crop production process dynamic modeling method is difficult to apply in practice. In this connection, an alternative approach to control the crops nitrogen content based on the remote sensing processing is proposed. Cereal crops aerial photographs are used as the initial data of the problem under consideration. In addition, ground-based measurements can be used. Two approaches to solve this problem based on image processing are proposed. The first method is based on the analysis of plant color characteristics. In the case when in addition to the aerial photograph of crops there is a set of ground-based measurements of nitrogen content in plants, it is advisable to carry out spatial interpolation using the kriging method. It should be noted that in spite of the high accuracy of the plant nitrogen content prediction by both methods, the approach using test sites seems to be more effective.