Search

Precision agriculture for banana crops has been little investigated so far. The main difficulty to implement precision agriculture methods lies in the asynchronicity of this crop: after a few cycles, each plant has its own development stage in the field. Indeed, maps of agronomical interest are difficult to produce from plant responses without implementing new methods. The present study explores the feasibility to derive a spatially relevant indicator from the date of flowering and the date of maturity (time to harvest). The time between these dates (TFM) may give insight in spatial distribution of vigor. The study was carried out using production data from 2015 acquired in a farm from Cameroon. Data from individual plants that flowered at different weeks were gathered so as to increase the density of TFM sampling. The temporal variability of TFM, which is induced by weather and operational constraints, was compensated by centering TFM data on their medians (TFMc). The mapping of TFMc was obtained using a classical kriging method. Spatial structures highlighted by TFMc either at the farm level or at the plot level, suggest that such maps could be used to support agronomic decisions.