Formation of methodological approaches to creating a cartographic base for adaptive landscape farming at the microzonal level and assessment of the economic efficiency of their application

The present land use pattern of the Belgorod region is dominated by small farms: according to the 2021 agricultural micro-census, half of the peasant (farm) enterprises and individual entrepreneurs that possessed agricultural land held less than 100 hectares. For such farms, located on erosion-prone slope agrolandscapes, a conventional cartographic base at a scale of 1:5000 does not allow the identification of microgeomorphological elements or statistically significant microzones. The article proposes methodological approaches to the formation of a cartographic base for adaptive landscape farming at the microzonal level, comprising six successive stages, from aerial photography with unmanned aerial vehicles to the construction of microzone maps in geographic information systems and the monitoring of the decisions taken. The research was carried out in 2019-2025 on a slope working plot of 8.44 hectares at the experimental field farm of Division No. 2 of the Belgorod Federal Agricultural Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Belgorod district, Belgorod region). It was established that aerial photography provides a spatial resolution of 3-5 cm per pixel and a georeferencing accuracy meeting the requirements of the 1:500 scale. A comparative assessment of the labour intensity and cost of classical geodetic surveying and unmanned aerial surveying was performed: for a plot of 100 hectares, the field stage is reduced from 10-20 working days for a team of three or four specialists to 30-60 minutes for a single operator, and the cost of the work falls from 3-7 million roubles to 50-300 thousand roubles. For a model farm with 1000 hectares of arable land, of which 400 hectares lie on erosion-prone slopes, the one-time expenditure on the cartographic base amounts to 900 thousand roubles, the annual saving of fertilisers to 1.6 million roubles, and the total annual effect including the yield increase to 4.8 million roubles, with a payback period of 0.19-0.56 years. It was established that the application of NPK raises the yield of winter wheat of the Almera variety on the slope plot from 3.15 to 4.16 t per hectare, that is, by 32 %, compensating for about half of the gap relative to the watershed plot. Mechanisms for improving the economic accessibility of the technology for small farms are proposed.