Prof. Dr. agr. Ruprecht Herbst

---

Dr. Ruprecht Herbst (40) started working as a Junior Professor for the Division Precision Agriculture at the faculty of agriculture and horticulture at the Humboldt-University zu Berlin on September 1st in 2003. After he graduated from high school he completed an apprenticeship in farming. In 1986, he enrolled at the University Of Applied Science of Weihenstephan, later on he switched to the University Of Applied Science of Kiel. Mr. Herbst received a scholarship of the Carl Duisburg Society and spent one year in the US where he worked on a diary-farm for three months and attended one semester at the University of Minnesota studying agricultural management. In 1997, he finished studying agriculture and graduated from Christian Albrecht University (CAU) in Kiel. Since then he is a member of the research-group Soil-Informatics under the guidance of Professor Lamp. Mr. Herbst finished his doctorate in 2002. The topic of his thesis was "Soil surveys, geoelectric probing and pedostatistic modelling as a basis for establishing digital Farm-Soil-Maps for Precision Agriculture". The research-group Soil informatics of the CAU Kiel is devoting its attention to Precision Agriculture, putting an emphasis on quantitative characteristics of site specific heterogeneity. Main focus of Mr. Herbst´s studies was to determine the acceptance potential of Precision Agriculture in Germany. He did further research on developing efficient systems to aquire and analyze field data with the help of databases, geographic information systems and geostatistics. From 1999 until 2002, he was assistant scientist at the CAU Kiel within the bounds of the research project "Managament systems for site-specific Farming (Preagro)". Preagro was sponsored by the BMBF (Ministery for Education and Research). His research-group developed a new soil mapping technique that was tested and constantly improved in 8 different soil areas within Germany. Developing digital "Farm-soil-maps", sensor based survey-systems to detect soil heterogeneity (EM-38, multispectral remote sensing), geostatistic methods for determining small scale heterogeneity as well as the development of a monitoring concept for nutrients (P, K, Mg) are further main emphasises of the research group. In the future, Mr. Herbst wants to increase the integration of computer based management systems for animal and plant production.