Precision Technology in the Danish Agriculture

Specialeforsvar ved Anne Jessen Jensen

Titel: Precision Technology in the Danish Agriculture

Abstract: This master thesis investigates the use of precision technology in the Danish agriculture. The investigation is based on 6644 observations from Danish farms with information such as accounts, operation branches and sizes of the farms. Some of the farmers has answered a questionnaire from Danmarks Statistik concerning the use of precision technology. We have used different approaches to investigate the data. We have defined a logistic regres- sion model, where the binary variable showing the use of precision technology. To investigate how well the model performs we have used the ROC curve and Tjur’s D. Variables such as the number of hectares and the total income from crops were among the significant variables. Next we perform a categorical data analysis to search for significant interactions in the data. We have created an association diagram, to investigate dependencies between variables. We found that there was a significant third order interaction between the use of precision technology, the total gross income and the financial support from EU. We have performed a cluster analysis, where we created three clusters. By performing an independence test, we saw that the use of precision technology was dependent of the three clusters. The cluster with the highest probability of using precision technology, had 228 hectares on average. Finally we calculated the average income per hectare for observations that did use precision technology, and compared this to the observations that did not use precision technology. By performing a t-test, we saw that the two averages were significantly different.

Vejleder: Anders Milhøj
Censor: Birger Madsen