Strategies to promote precision farming in India using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Precision agriculture (PA), a climate-smart approach, utilizes advanced technologies such as remote sensing, GIS, GPS and variable-rate applications to optimize resource use, reduce environmental impacts and enhance agricultural productivity. Despite its potential, the adoption of PA in India faces significant barriers, particularly for small and marginal farmers who represent 89.4 % of the farming community. This study aimed to identify and prioritize strategies to promote PA adoption in western and north western zones of Tamil Nadu (2023) using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a robust decision-making tool suitable for addressing complex multi-criteria problems. Four strategic categories-socio-economic, farm-level, political and technological-were analyzed through expert evaluations. Results revealed that farm-level strategies hold the highest priority (scaling factor = 0.288), followed by technological strategies (0.246), socio-economic strategies (0.234) and political strategies (0.232). The high ranking of farm-level strategies underscores the importance of implementing measures such as laser land levelers, precision nutrient management and water-use efficiency tools. The calculated Consistency Ratio (CR = 0.0081) confirmed the reliability and validity of these results. These findings provide practical and research baked strategies for grassroots agricultural institutions such as Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), Agricultural Technology Management Agencies (ATMAs) and NGOs, emphasizing the need to redirect resources toward farm-level interventions to scale up PA practices and achieve sustainable agricultural development which could potentially raise the adoption among small and marginal farmers by about 20-25 % within the next five years.