Current Situation and Future of Precision Agriculture in Thailand

The traditional agricultural research and improvement framework, based on the reductionism paradigm, that form the conceptual basis of agriculture today, are insufficient to address the demands of various actors. Precision Agriculture (PA), paradigms and technologies, have their origins in improving the efficiency of farm-level agricultural resource management based on understanding-driven/data-driven paradigm (UDP), especially modeling and decision support systems (DSS). DSS can be further developed into PA Simulators and are relevant to agricultural systems in a small-farm context. UDP paradigm is systemically creating new collaborative learning and evolving predictive capacity, which create opportunities to co-manage limited resources. In Thailand since 2015, PA was considered as a means of helping policy makers, researchers, and farmers to deal with increased information, increasingly complex decisions and to professionalize their activities. PA has been widely proposed and developed as providing a basis for improving sustainability of farm-level resource management. However, PA has, up-to-now and in practice, had limited impact in many farm-level resource management contexts, in particular land and labor resources in Thailand. Failures can be attributed to non-delivery, inaccessible technologies and un-coordinated-isolated-silo-short-term-based agencies/actors of government institutions. We have conducted a series of forums on PA for fruit crops with groups of experts and key stakeholders during late 2020 to early 2021. Four plausible future scenarios of PA for fruit crops in Thailand were formulated based on trends and drivers in social, technology, economy, environment, policy and value contexts. It was concluded that policy makers, with long-term political wills, must reinvent the entire institutional system to take advantage of emerging analog and digital technologies. The new system should meet demands and challenges of the BCG model (Bio-Circular-Green economy model). The model called for inclusiveness of actors, i.e., small farms and multi-disciplinary scientists for long-term vision and goal.