Madurai:
A horticulture farm in Gundupatti in Kodaikanal block of Dindigul district has gone high-tech with the installation of the GIS (geographic information system), as part of a pilot project. The GIS provides global access to promote site-specific farming for the first time in Tamil Nadu.
According to S Raja Mohamed, deputy director horticulture (Central schemes) Kodaikanal, the programme has been launched with the objective of locating polygreen houses using GIS. It is being built with the help of subsidy assistances from the National Horticulture Mission (NHM) for the year 2012-13, in the spatial imagery and to add the attribute data (obtained during the field work) to those polyhouse features.
The GIS-initiative project was taken up by the department of horticulture, Kodaikanal division in co-ordination with the agriculture engineering department, Dindigul division and Remote Sensing and GIS Lab, ECE department, Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE). The processes involved includes the raw imagery (the satellite imagery of the location containing the poly houses is obtained), geo-referencing (the spatial data is geo-referenced using the particular toolbar), digitisation and photo-annealing (the images of the polyhouses are also attached with the point features by defining a field of type ‘raster’).
Mohamed said that development and implementation of precision farming or site-specific farming has been made possible by combining the GPS and GIS. These technologies enable the coupling of real-time data collection with accurate position information, leading to the efficient manipulation and analysis of large amounts of geospatial data.
GPS-based applications in precision farming are being used for farm planning, field mapping, soil sampling, tractor guidance, crop scouting, variable rate applications and yield mapping in the developed countries. The carnations grown in polyhouses in Kodaikanal are of international quality coming next only to their famous Columbian counterparts. If accessible over the GPS, cut flower cultivators in the region can become global entrepreneurs without the interference of middlemen as their buyers can get details about them from anywhere in the world.
Precision farming is now changing the way farmers and agribusinesses view the land from which they reap their profits. Position information system provides position data with acceptable degree of accuracy, available on demand at any time and at any location and is able to interface with other equipment. Farmers using the GPS system have the advantage of utilizing their land to the maximum.
According to Mohamed and G Kandasamy, deputy director of horticulture (state schemes), four poly green houses of 8,754 sq metres, belonging to four beneficiaries of Gundupatti in Kodaikanal block, were built with the subsidy being provided under NHM during the year 2012-2013.
With the help of the agriculture engineering department, Dindigul, ground control points (GCP) with GPS measurement for the poly houses were taken and were processed with the help of R A Alaguraja, associate professor, ECE department, TCE for representing these poly houses using GIS.
Mohamed said that the GIS would provide a big advantage to farmers especially those into the floral industry, which is the cut flower industry.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / Home> City> Madurai / by Padmini Sivarajah, TNN / November 22nd, 2012