Precision agriculture tools for liming management in mango orchards in the Brazilian semiarid region

Abstract

Optimizing the recommendation for the management of Liming Demand (LD) is essential for cost reduction and increased yield mango. Therefore, the objective of this study was to delimit management zones for the limestone recommendation in areas of irrigated mango in the Brazilian semiarid using precision agriculture techniques. The experiment was carried out in three commercial mango orchards located in the region of the San Francisco Valley, Brazil. Soil samples were collected in 0.0-0.2 m and 0.2-0.4 m depths following regular grids where the number of samples varied from 50 to 56. Soil analyses were performed. The kriging and inverse distance weighting method were used to interpolated the maps.  The LD map was performed from the potential cation exchange capacity (T) and bases saturation (BS) maps. It was verified that the Mandacaru area obtained 63.42% of the field requiring liming, being subdivided into four management zones. The Sempre Verde area obtained 1.20% of the area requiring liming and the Barreiro de Santa Fé area did not present a need for the LD map. The use of precision farming techniques to delineate management zones was adequate to separate the areas into smaller and more homogeneous zones, for a more precise recommendation of liming demand.