How many gigabytes per hectare are available in the digital agriculture era? A digitization footprint estimation

Abstract

The applications of digital agriculture technologies are increasing rapidly with increased interest from the new generation of farmers to use digital solutions. Such technologies include several in-field and remote sensors besides data processing software packages. The accumulation of archived data from season to season has become an issue considering the high spatial and temporal resolution of the generated data from the commercially available sensors. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate and quantify the accumulated data considering the evolution of utilized digital solutions from a farmer's case study. This study estimated the data storage disc space requirements in the last two decades from a 22 ha field located in North Italy. The farmer's accumulated data sources were from an in-field weather station, soil analysis information, soil apparent electrical conductivity scanning, soil moisture sensor, planter performance monitoring system, yield maps, Sentinel-2 satellite images, and recently drone images. The accumulated data were reported on an annual basis with respect to each year's specific contribution. The results showed that the total accumulated data size from the study field reached 18.6 GB in 2020 mainly due to the use of drone images with a predicted total data size of 40.5 GB by 2025.