Smart Good Agricultural Practices (S-GAP) is a management information system which combines precision agriculture application into the three levels of the decision making process (strategic, tactical, operational) together with automated compliance to agricultural and environmental standards. As the relevant farm data are already available in the farm office, or may be automatically integrated using standardized services, documentation in the form of instructions to operators, certification of agricultural standards and cross compliance to EU regulations can be generated more easily with S-GAP than with the current paper-based systems. S-GAP will cover the appropriate precision agriculture activities and appropriate protocols for the six major field operations carried out in the field during the growing season: tillage, seeding, fertilizing, spraying, irrigations and harvesting.
The increasing demand for more precise application of inputs, which can be serviced by precision agriculture applications, is combined here with compliance to standards in the six major field operations. This combination of automated compliance to standards and integration of precision agriculture applications in an integrated system will be a significant step forward towards a “greening agriculture” and gives more added value to further enhance the adoption of precision agriculture coupled with agricultural and environmental standards. This is a very timely project as it is more recently published a report by the EU on the necessity to bring precision agriculture practices with the new CAP (Tejada et al., 20141)
S-GAP is facilitating exactly this procedure: users simply select the operation they want to conduct, the level of decision making they want to make and the system provides them with the specific standard that needs to be followed in the form of a checklist. The system covers precision agriculture practices for each one of the six field operations. Figure 1 shows S-GAP overview.
