Farmers' perception of precision technology: The case of autosteer adoption by cotton farmers

Precision agriculture and autosteer technology are, overall, profitable investments for farmers, as previous literature has established. However, what has not been investigated is whether or not farmers perceive these technologies as such. This research postulates that cotton farmers must see potential for higher profits as a result of adopting precision technologies in order to adopt it. Using the 2009 Southern Cotton Precision Farming Survey and multinomial logit model, this research investigates farmers' perception of precision agriculture and how those perceptions impact adoption of the autosteer GPS guidance system. Autosteer adoption was found to be significant and positively related to the perceived future importance of precision agriculture as well as farmers' ranking of input cost savings relative to other attributes of the autosteer GPS technology. Additionally, results show that the attributes of the cotton picker are also important factors in adoption of autosteer GPS technology. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.