For successful dosing of plant protection products, the characteristics of the vine canopies should be known, based on which the spray amount should be dosed. In the field experiment, we compared two optical experimental methods, terrestrial lidar and aerial photogrammetry, with manual defoliation of some selected vines. Like those of other authors, our results show that both terrestrial lidar and aerial photogrammetry were able to represent the canopy well with correlation coefficients around 0.9 between the measured variables and the number of leaves. We found that in the case of aerial photogrammetry, significantly more points were found in the point cloud, but this depended on the choice of the ground sampling distance. Our results show that in the case of aerial UAS photogrammetry, subdividing the vine canopy segments to 5 × 5 cm gives the best representation of the volume of vine canopies.

The concept of precision farming is wide, and it represents the efficiency which is achieved with the help of precision. For the navigation of field machines, the RTK (Real Time Kinematic) navigation is needed. In order to verify the positive effects in practice, RTK navigation system equipped with Fentd 828 was applied to test the width of overlap, and fuel and time that could be saved compared with manual driving. The experiment was conducted on two areas of land size of 172 m × 58 m with two working machines width 3 m and 6 m. Results indicated that 15.7% of the time and 8.66% of the fuel were saved on a working machine of 3 meters width, and 12.6% of the time and 8.28% of the fuel were saved on a working machine of 6 m width. The width of the overlap represent 10% of the working width of the machine, and with the method of turning, which RTK navigation allows, additional time was saved. Ecological footprint, CO2 emissions and global warming potential (GWP) was estimated under different guiding systems. The largest footprint was related to manual tillage with 3 m width working machine, while estimation on CO2 (kg) emissions and GWP obtained the same result. The use of precision agriculture technologies allows better planning and analyzing of working procedures. The air, water and soil pollution are less intensive. Keywords: precision farming, RTK technology, ecological footprint, environmental pollution, tillage DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20191205.4932 Citation: Kelc D, Stajnko D, Berk P, Rakun J, Vindiš P, Lakota M. Reduction of environmental pollution by using RTK-navigation in soil cultivation. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2019; 12(5): 173–178.

In the process of applying a plant protection product mixed with water (spray mixture) at the prescribed concentration with conventional sprayers for chemical protection of tree canopies in an orchard, standard models are used to express the dose rate of the plant protection product. Characteristic properties of the tree canopy in an orchard are not taken into consideration. Such models result in fixed quantities of spray mixture being sprayed through individual nozzles into a tree canopy. In this research work, an autonomous system is presented, which ensures a controlled quantity of spray mixture sprayed through the nozzles onto different tree canopy segments. The autonomous system is based on a fuzzy logic system (FLS) that includes information about the estimated leaf area to ensure more appropriate control of the spray mixture. An integral part of the FLS is a fuzzy logic controller for three electromagnetic valves operating in the pulse width mode and installed on the axial sprayer prototype. The results showed that, with the FLS, it was possible to control the quantity of spray mixture in the specific range depending on the estimated value of the leaf area, with a quantitative spray mixture average saving of 17.92%. For the phenological growth stage BBCH 91, this method represents a powerful tool for reducing the quantity of spray mixture for plant protection in the future.

The fourth industrial revolution, which has begun couple of years ago, covers not only "smart" and interconnected machines and systems. It also coincides with further discoveries in various areas, from determining the genome sequence to nanotechnology and from renewable sources to quantum computing. The correlation between these technologies and their interaction in the physical, digital and biological field is what makes the fourth industrial revolution significantly different from the previous ones. The events should be faster, more extensive and radical, which will require the transformation of entire systems through (and within) countries, businesses, industries and society as a whole. We are already talking about switching from financing innovative projects to Comprehensive Innovation Ecosystems (AKIS). The paper describes some important research work from the field of automatization and digitalization of slovenian agriculture.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the alternative methods of weed control in the vineyard under 'Sauvignon' vines to reduce ecological footprint in vineyard production. Weed control was performed at the experimental site with the mechanical weed control under vines with a grass cutter, a rotating star hoe (roll hoe) and a vine trunk cleaner, while at the same time additional mulching was carried out in the belts between the rows. The ecological footprint of each production operation was estimated by including environmental impacts related to fossil-C (kg CO2/hm2 ), air, water, soil, nonrenewable, renewable, and area resources. While carrying out the mechanical control, we analysed the weed coverage, grape yield and yield loss. Grape yield was highest for weedfree control plots, followed by plots where ploughshare was used. Yield loss was lowest when using ploughshare. In addition to the weed-free plot, weed coverage was lowest when glyphosate was used. The maximum amount of CO2 is released while using rotating star hoe. At the grass cutter and vine trunk cleaner less CO2 was released. The same is with global warming potential (GWP).