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{ 2009 12 21 }

Manitoba Agronomists Conference 2009 – Day 1 Precision Agriculture: Potential and Payback

I attended the Manitoba Agronomists Conference on December 15-16.  Here are my notes from the first session of the first day.

Precision Ag update – Trends in practices and management of data- Harold Reetz, IPNI

This talk was very informative.  It was interesting to listen to someone who’ has been working on this for decades.

  • How do we merge Information Technology and Agriculture?
  • The top crops in the world are wheat, maize, and rice
  • Think systems – we need to integrate all components to maximize effectiveness
  • Sources of increased yield production include biotech, marker assisted breeding, conventional breeding, and agronomics
  • The goal is to double current food production by 2030 in order to feed the projected population at that time
  • One of the keys is to watch what’s being done by the very best producers and try to build on that and pass their practices on to others
  • Four fertilizer rights: Right source (all needed nutrients), Right rate (asses current soil nutrients and plant demand), Right time, Right place
  • Interactions are important
  • Local scale improvements lead to global benefits
  • Soil tests are best for trends, not year by year management

Exploiting spatial and temporal variability in the Prairies Chris Holzapfel, AAFC

I liked getting a perspective from the Prairies, rather than from experts from places that are very different. 

  • Spatial variability – difference across locations
  • Temporal variability – difference across time
  • Precision Ag is one of the fastest growing ag sectors
  • Causes of spatial variability:
  • Topography
  • Soil Texture
  • Soil Fertility
  • Erosion
  • Salinity
  • Data for assessing spatial variability
    • Elevation (DEM)
    • Conductivity (Veris)
    • Soil color (Air photos)
    • Biomass (NDVI)
    • and others
  • The cycle of Management Zones
    • Data collection / mapping
    • Clustering (create zones)
    • Verify zones
    • Apply zone management
    • Repeat
  • Unsupervised classification of zones (Zone creation by algorithms)
    • Fuzme algorithm
    • NDVI gave them the best results
  • Major causes of Temporal Variability
    • Precipitation
    • Temperature
    • Disease
    • Insects
  • Canada has a huge variability in wheat yields (compared to the rest of the world).   Currently Australia is more variable
  • There is lots of year to year variability despite general upward production trends
  • The limiting factor in precision ag is currently sensitivity of application equipment, not sensor technology
  • Zone management addresses spatial variability but does not address temporal variability
  • Real-time sensing helps with temporal variability but is still fairly limited
  • The current challenge is to integrate real time sensing and zone management

    • Developing variable rate programs at the dealership – Kelly Sharpe, GK Technology

    This talk was great for showing the considerations that should go into developing a variable rate program.  So far our clients have not been terribly interested in variable rate.

    • Variable rate cycle
    • Data
    • Zones
    • Fertility needs – sampling
    • Prescriptions
    • Application
    • Repeat
  • Questions to ask when outsourcing mapping
    • How will you get the maps?
    • Who owns the data?
    • Who sets the application rates?
    • Options for special events or zones
    • Minimal time requirement
  • Questions to ask when doing in-house mapping
    • What will your primary data source be?  (Satellite images / topography/ yield maps/ veris)
    • Do you have personnel with required capabilities?
    • Do you have the time to do this?
    • What software will you use?  (Ag Data viewer, Easy Suite, Farmworks Pro, GTA500, SMS Advance, SST Summit)  You will often need two different packages to cover everything.
  • How will you price this?
    • Piece by piece?
    • Bundles
    • Whole package
    • By field or by acre?
  • Case studies
    • Outsourced: $38,000 cost, 60-80 hours of dealership’s time
    • In-house: $36,000 cost, 1,000 hours of dealership’s time
  • Take your time in deciding what course to pursue

    • Economic evaluation of zone managed fertility – Matt Wiebers, The Mosaic Company

    I liked his emphasis that zones are not economical everywhere.  Think before you zone!

    • Is anyone actually using this technology?
    • Is it hard to learn how to do this?
    • Do the economics work for consultants and growers?
    • Agvise aggregate results show that there are people out there doing a number of zone samples (my best estimate from the numbers shown is 10-20% of Manitoba fields)
    • Fields need significant yield variability for precision to pay
    • Operation cost savings should exceed cost of zone program – any increased yield is a bonus
    • Steps
    • imagery used to create yield potential zones
    • define representative area (test strips)
    • measure yield
    • summarize data
  • There will be fields where it works and field where it doesn’t

    • Precision Ag opportunities on the farm – Clay Mitchell, innovative Iowa grower

    It was interesting to hear a farmer describe how he puts precision ag into practice. 

    • Uses tracked fields
    • Controlled traffic farming from Australia
    • Cuts down soil compaction overall
    • Big issue is rutting
    • Rotational tillage only exacerbates the problem
  • Does single row yield mapping
  • The key is measure, then analyze to find problems
  • RTK auto steering and herbicide tolerant crops are key to his operation
  • By strip cropping corns and soybeans he keeps the rotational benefits
  • There are significant beneficial boundary effects to getting fore sunshine onto corn.
    • Posted by jtone on Monday, December 21, 2009, at 2:47 PM. Filed under Crops. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

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    1. Agvise Soil Fertility Seminar 2010 | Tone Ag Consulting Ltd. | December 8, 2010 at 4:28 PM | Permalink

      [...] Sharpe’s presentation was pretty much the same one he gave at the Agronomist’s conference. Make sure to keep trying tweaking the system and evaluating the [...]

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