In precision farming, individual plants or plant community within larger agricultural areas are cultivated on a site-specific basis using various technologies with the aim of increasing the efficiency of food production by taking factors such as soil conditions, nutrient composition or local pest infestations into account. To ensure this, diagnostic and adaptive techniques are used to collect precise data on individual areas in the field on the one hand and to enable a meticulous and individualised response to specific requirements on the other. A more differentiated way of farming is not only expected to achieve higher yields, but also to reduce the consumption of water, fertilisers and pesticides through more targeted use. Automation in all stages of the production process could also save on labour costs, which could lead to organic farming becoming more cost-effective in the long term.

While precision farming is expected to make a positive contribution to the food supply and at the same time improve the ecological balance of agriculture, in practice it poses various ethical, ecological and social problems. To begin with, it is debatable whether the ecological balance of precision farming is actually positive, as the applications are in many cases based on artificial intelligence, the training and assembly of which is also associated with considerable environmental problems that may not be compensated for by improved production conditions in the field of application. The systems are also very expensive and therefore primarily profitable for large agricultural companies, which, combined with the cost savings resulting from the use of the technologies, is further perpetuating the already problematic demise of small farms. At the same time, it is primarily the latter that can make the greater contribution to food supply and biodiversity globally and in the long term. Accordingly, on the one hand, a decrease in the number of people working in agriculture is to be expected, while on the other hand, agricultural work will have a different character, based primarily on the management of various automated processes. As profit maximisation goes hand in hand with a loss of jobs and human labour, it is also to be considered that crucial agricultural skills will be unlearned, as they will be taken over by robots in the future, which may lead to a dependency on them without knowing how reliable they will be in the long term. Precision farming in industrial animal farming goes hand in hand with the concern that animals will be objectified even more than they already are and that any cases of abuse will remain even more undocumented without human witnesses.