TULARE — Judging from presentations Wednesday at a conference in Tulare, it looks like precision agriculture is the path Kings County growers must follow to meet the challenge of tighter environmental restrictions, global competition, scarce water and higher costs.

“Precision agriculture is the only way,” said engineer and former CSU Fresno professor Karl Longley.

Gone are the simple days of planting a field, spreading manure, running irrigation down furrows and harvesting, all with little or no regulation.

In California’s climate of hyper-competition and stringent environmental requirements, it looks like the only way for agriculture to move forward is to get more efficient.

Actually, even more efficient might be a better phrase. San Joaquin Valley agriculture, particularly on big farms like those on the Westside, has already developed a wide array of technological applications that would spin the heads of farmers a few generations ago.

Farmers use global positioning systems to keep fields ramrod straight and avoid overlap of seeding, spraying and fertilizing. They use satellite imagery to tell them where to add less fertilizer, and where to add more. And they have the automated systems to do it.

And the science of precision farming is going to get even more exact. The industry is moving toward combining aerial images with variable rate irrigation to pinpoint exactly the right amount of water at exactly the right spot at exactly the right time.

At Stone Land Company in Stratford, said crop advisor Justin Dutra, they’re already using many precision techniques. For example, they have fertilizer applicators that automatically put more or less onto different parts of a field based on a database of satellite-derived information about soil quality and other factors.

“That’s a definite good. We don’t have to apply any more than we have to,” Dutra said.

Dutra was also interested in presentations on giant center-pivot sprinklers, which are used successfully by some Westside farmers in Fresno County.

Precision ag, including precision irrigation, promises to give farmers more bang for the buck. But it also helps growers satisfy tougher water and air quality rules, said conference presenter Chat Cowherd of the Midwest Research Institute.

Dutra said that Stone Land Company and other Westside farms “have some really cutting edge stuff.”

But, he added, “All of this is irrelevant without water.”

The reporter can be reached at 583-2432.