Precision Agriculture: Variable-Rate Application Simulator

Precision Agriculture

Soil variability 55%

Sensor zones 8×8

Drone speed 8 cells/s

Resource applied

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Coverage

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Savings vs uniform spraying

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How it works

Under the field lies a true need map — how much fertilizer or water each soil cell actually requires, shaded from blue (needs little) to red (needs a lot). A drone sweeps the field in a boustrophedon (lawnmower) pattern, and each cell it passes over is revealed and dosed. In variable-rate mode, the on-board sensors only resolve the field into a coarser grid of zones — the dose for every cell in a zone is the zone's average need, not the true per-cell value, so a coarser sensor still wastes some resource even though it is smarter than blanket spraying. In uniform mode every cell gets the same maximum dose regardless of need, which is the baseline every precision-ag technology is measured against.

dose(cell) = avg(need over its sensor zone) · maxDose   [variable-rate]
dose(cell) = maxDose                                    [uniform]
savings = (1 − Σdose_applied / Σdose_uniform_baseline) × 100%

Soil variability — how much the true need fluctuates across the field; a perfectly uniform field has nothing to gain from precision application.
Sensor zones — how finely the system can resolve the field; 1×1 collapses to a single blanket dose, 16×16 resolves every cell individually.
Drone speed — how fast the scan sweep covers the field.
Mode — switch between variable-rate application and uniform blanket spraying to compare resource use directly.

Real-world relevance: this is the core economic case for precision agriculture — RTK-GPS, soil and NDVI sensors, and drone surveys exist specifically to raise the effective zone resolution, so the same yield is reached with less fertilizer, water and pesticide.

Low need Medium need High need Unscanned

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