Precision Pays

The CropLife/Purdue Precision Agriculture survey is back after taking a year off and revealing the latest precision trends.

The survey, conducted this year by marketing consultant Dr. Linda D. Whipker and Purdue’s Dr. Bruce Erickson, was first conducted 16 years ago, when precision technologies were just entering the market. “After 16 years, the biggest change that has occurred is that many of these methods of serving the agricultural community and growing crops have become so common place that they aren’t thought of as unique any more,” they report. “However, the rapid improvements in technologies and how they’re implemented into everyday business continues to grow.”

CropLife’s Paul Schrimpf came up with 10 key trends from the latest survey, including that precision technology is becoming mainstream. “A curious “trend” expressed in the survey results was that the number of retailers offering precision agriculture “services” appears to be dropping in key categories, including georeferenced soil sampling and fieldmapping with GIS. Certainly, retailers may be outsourcing these services to other entities, or some growers might be doing some of this work on their own. But we also feel that it’s just as likely an indication that these services have become so integrated into full-service retailers that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate it out as an a la carte service. Precision services are packaged up into a larger, more holistic offering.”

Read more here and here.

The same precision farming techniques that work with crops can work with manure management on cattle feedlots, according to USDA scientists.

Agricultural engineers and USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Clay Center, Neb., map the distribution of manure on the surface of feedlots and the flow of liquid manure in rain runoff.

This research could lead to both precision harvesting of manure and also precision application of manure to crop fields, while controlling nutrient losses, gas emissions, and odors.

The scientists map manure distribution by slowly towing a GPS-equipped conductivity meter over feedlot pens and cropland. The meter estimates the amount and quality of manure in various places on the feedlot surface by measuring the manure’s ability to conduct electricity. Manure contains salt from feed supplements. Salt, in solution, is an excellent conductor of electricity.

Click here to read more.

Photo: Agricultural engineers Roger Eigenberg (left) and Bryan Woodbury evaluate a soil electrical conductivity map of a vegetative treatment area. Photo by Stephen Ausmus.

Plans to build a $13.5 million, 50,000-square-foot agricultural research center with 18,000 square feet of world-class research greenhouse space near Research Triangle Park were recently announced by the governor of North Carolina.

“As complex environmental issues – like the growing world population, limits to world food supply, shrinking natural resources, and the need to develop green technologies – become increasingly urgent, the new Ag-Tech Center along with North Carolina’s commitment to education, innovation and agribusiness will ensure that our state plays a vital role in tackling those challenges,” said Governor Bev Perdue, in making the announcement at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.

The Alexandria Ag-Tech Center will feature cutting-edge individual greenhouse modules and support areas along with innovative shared amenities. Each greenhouse will have separate environmental controls, planting and support spaces.

Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a Multi-Rotor Remote Sensing System!

Somehow Multi-Rotor Remote Sensing System (MRRSS) just doesn’t have quite the same ring as Superman, but these tiny remote-controlled, camera-equipped drones could give some farmers super powers to see their crops from a bird’s eye view. University researchers from Arkansas, Florida and Ohio are currently studying the applications of the system which consists of a six- to eight-rotor, remotely controlled helicopter that provides a stable platform for the off-the-shelf digital camera that sends back video and stills to the ground crew. The system includes image recognition software that can teach itself to recognize individual trees or plants and count them. With different sensors, the machine could potentially detect disease, irrigation or fertilizer issues, predict crop yields and more.

The idea for the system came from Reza Ehsani, Assistant Professor and Precision Agriculture Specialist with the University of Florida’s Citrus Research and Education Center. It’s powered by a lithium ion polymer battery and a basic unit costs from $7,000 to $10,000. Ehsani says it would be a great tool for citrus growers to use to combat citrus greening.

Arkansas researchers are interested in how the system could help row crop farmers and the project in that state is being funded partially by the state soybean board. In Oregon, nurseries and tree farms have the most interest.

AquaLiv, Inc., has officially released its first commercialized agriculture product, AgSmart™ Rice.

AquaLiv scientists have been performing agriculture enhancement studies in Japan for over ten years. AgSmart™ has proven to vastly increase the yields and quality in several crops without chemicals or genetic manipulation. The company claims AgSmart™ is the only agriculture biotechnology solution that is also natural and organic standards compliant.

“Our rice study demonstrated a 100% yield increase on a scientist managed plot and a 32% yield increase on a working commercial farm who agreed to implement our technology,” stated AquaLiv CEOCraig Hoffman. “These increases indicate significant value to both farms and global food production.”

Based on AquaLiv’s BioT™ Bioinformation Technology, AgSmart™ maximizes crop potential by accelerating plants’ natural adaptivity while exposing them to a frequency-based information composite. The information composite includes local environment data (climate, pests, diseases) and traits of other species generally only available through hybridization. AgSmart™ does not involve the actual hybridization of plants nor does it utilize genetic manipulation.

As Ann Perry reports:

Wheat farmers in eastern Oregon and Washington who use no-till production systems can substantially stem soil erosion and enhance efforts to protect water quality, according to research by USDA scientists. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) hydrologist John Williams led a study that compared runoff, soil erosion and crop yields in a conventional, intensively tilled winter wheat-fallow system and a no-till 4-year cropping rotation system. ARS is USDA’s chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA mission of promoting sustainable agriculture.

No-till production left the soil surface intact and protected pore space beneath the soil surface, which allowed more water to infiltrate into the subsoil. In addition, there was no significant yield difference between the no-till and conventional till production, and direct seeding in no-till production saved fuel and time.
Read more about this research in the March 2011 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

A new biocatalyst platform designed for hydroponic systems has been proven in recent tests to speed up crop growth enough to allow an extra harvest each year. Chesapeake Greenhouse, LLC lettuce hydroponic farm in Maryland recently completed a trial testing of BiOWiSH-Hydroponic — a revolutionary water treatment solution that helps increase nutrient availability, improve plant vigor, and stimulate microbial activity while preventing sludge build-up and problematic scaling in dripper lines, micro-tubes and Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) gulley floors.

The implementation of BiOWiSH-Hydroponic into the fertility program at Chesapeake Greenhouse reduced the required time to produce a market crop by over 10% from 37 days to 33 days.

Click here to read the full BiOWiSH Chesapeake Greenhouse case study.

Researchers with the University of Missouri have found a way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by agricultural operations, while increasing the yields of the crops. And precision agriculture equipment is playing a key role.

Research agronomist at MU’s Greenley Research Center in northeast Missouri Kelly Nelson says that ag operations in the U.S. create 58 percent of the world’s nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes 300 times more to global warming than carbon dioxide. His work is focusing on the placement and source of fertilizers to reduce that nitrous oxide number.

“The fertilizer placement for a no-till system would be, for dry fertilizers, would be broadcast applied over the soil surface. We thought with a strip-till system we can till a small area, usually about 12 inches wide, usually less than 30 percent of the field, and maintain good soil cover, and apply that fertilizer in a band right under the plant so it has easy access to the fertilizer.”

He says using an enhanced-efficiency polymer coated urea and non-coated urea, they were able to test in a clay pan soil, where there is very poor internal drainage and fertilizer loss can be substantial.

“We saw that over the entire growing season, we were emitting about 2.4 to 3.8 percent of the nitrogen applied as nitrous oxide.” Nelson says that while it doesn’t seem like a big number, it shows how much greenhouse gas can be emitted into the atmosphere. Plus, he says this system was able to increase yields. “We were seeing that our strip-till system was increasing yields by about 50 bushels to the acre (in corn), compared to our no-till system.” And it reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 25 percent, compared to no-till systems.

Nelson admits that they didn’t compare the amount of emissions for running the extra equipment in the strip-till versus no-till operation, but that would be a comparison of CO2 emissions, and as stated earlier, much less impactful when you are considering greenhouse gases. Plus, the increased yields should help make up any differences by increasing the amount of carbon sequestration going on in the higher yielding strip-till operations.

He credits new, advanced precision agriculture equipment and practices for even making this kind of work possible.

“Getting the right product at the right time in the right place, that’s what we’re working toward. Precision ag is moving us in that direction.”

Listen to my interview with Kelly here: Kelly Nelson, MU research agronomist

The most influential people in the world are not politicians,
financial advisors, or corporate executives…
They are American farmers.

FS Green Plan Solutions is holding an informational conference this week in Peoria designed to help farmers pursue the maximum yields possible on their operations to continue to provide food, fiber and fuels for a growing world population.

Among the presentations, Dr. Mike Boehlje of Purdue University will discuss the factors driving world economics, and how they affect American agriculture. Dr. Fred Below and Dr. Vince Davis of the University of Illinois will talk about the ‘formulas’ for reaching unprecedented corn yield levels and recent research in maximizing soybean production. Agricultural attorney Gary Baise will review how modern agriculture plays in both the environmental and political landscapes, and discuss the efforts of agriculture industry advocates in informing and educating the American public on the value of optimizing and sustaining food production. A panel of industry experts will discuss how technology tools are supporting maximum yield potentials and GROWMARK Agronomy Services Manager Dr. Howard Brown will present the findings of field trials conducted by individual farmers in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin in their pursuit of maximum yields.

Precision Pays will be at the conference doing interviews with key presenters about this vitally important issue of increasing yields to share with our readers in the coming days. You will definitely want to stay tuned!

Don’t miss the upcoming February 9-10 NeATA conference in Grand Island, Neb., as it promises a technology extravaganza, along with other valuable topics such as precision Nitrogen management, social media, building consumer trust and much more.

The Nebraska Agricultural Technologies Association (NeATA), founded in 2001 by innovative Nebraska farmers, ranchers, agribusiness representatives and the University of Nebraska Extension, has compiled another great conference.

Need a technology makeover? How about using Nitrogen more wisely? Do you want to learn how to tell your story and share your values with consumers? How about learning a better way to select crop genetics? Check out the upcoming program, and book your trip now.

For Facebook users, find NeATA here and add them as a favorite.

Wireless on the farm can help produce better crops, net more money for growers and land a superior product in stores for consumers, according to studies by Texas AgriLife Research scientists.

“We’re working on a system that uses wireless sensing in rice production,” said Dr. Lee Tarpley, AgriLife Research plant physiologist in Beaumont. “We’d like to be able to continuously monitor field conditions such as temperature and soil moisture, and using sensors allows us to do that. We can put them in the field and collect the data from them inside on our computer.”

Other researchers have devised a wireless system that can pinpoint the location on the farm where each module of cotton grew so a farmer can use the information to figure out why fiber quality differed on various acres. “We wanted to take that data and map it back to the field the cotton was grown in,” said Dr. Alex Thomasson, AgriLife Research agricultural engineer. “That enabled us to look at areas of a given field where cotton of different quality comes from. The ultimate goal was to produce profit maps that show how much money is being made or lost on each portion of a field.”

Read the whole article from Texas AgriLife Research here and watch the video below.

What if you had good solid data that could be correlated and optimized for fertility, seeding rate, hybrid/variety type, and crop inputs—all by different management zones—for every field you farm?

To that end, I spoke today with John McGuire, owner and tech guru of Simplified Technology Services in Montpelier, Oh., who is helping growers in northwest Ohio figure out their fields with the help of powerful Ag Leader SMS Advanced software. McGuire works with growers on ways to optimize yield data collection, build management zones, conduct field research and help turn all that data into profitable management decisions.

“The first issue we help growers with is obtaining quality yield data with tools I developed to make yield monitor calibration easier. Once we have the data, then we sit down with growers and review each field with a LCD projector on a white board so the farmer can circle suspect areas of fields,” McGuire says.

He then takes all that information to set up management zones based on patterns they see in the fields then develop soil sampling plans from that. And as farmers obtain more data—such as Veris soil electrical conductivity, elevation data, planting data, product application data—he relies on the computing and analysis power of SMS Advanced software to layer all this data with yield and management zones.

“SMS allows us to look at many different comparisons, even point-by-point in a field, in order to look at many ‘what if’ scenarios to help figure out different approaches to try to solve problems areas of fields,” McGuire says. “And no matter what type of precision farming equipment a farmer uses, we can handle many data formats with SMS.”

Once farmers get comfortable with understanding what the software and data comparisons can do, then some will take it a step further and want to build strip trials into fields in order to make better management decisions. “We have a handful of growers who are conducting strip trials to compare hybrids and varieties, fungicides, seed treatments, nitrogen, P & K, seed populations and more. And as we add these data layers of results, the analysis tools in SMS Advanced really help growers make management decisions that save money and add profits,” he says.

“I’ve been working with SMS for almost ten years. I’m impressed with how much time Ag Leader spends polishing and continuing to tweak this already powerful software, constantly listening to users and providing superior analysis tools. It doesn’t get any better than SMS, as far as I can tell,” McGuire adds.

When not immersed in dealing with data, McGuire also works as a sales and service guy for Nester Ag Management, a precision agriculture equipment sales company.

Visit these links for more information.

SMS Advanced http://www.agleader.com/products/sms-advanced/

SMS Basic http://www.agleader.com/products/sms-basic/

Nester Ag http://www.nesterag.com/

Previous story on SMS and in-field scouting
http://precisionpays.com/2010/06/how-software-helps-in-season-scouting-and-management-zones/

Watching those yield numbers register as data on a map as you go round by round during harvest will help aid decision making this winter. To this end, John Fulton, Extension Specialists, Biosystems Engineering, Auburn University, wrote a good piece on how to use such data on the Alabama Cooperative Extension System’s Precision Ag Blog.

While yield monitors or maps can provide beneficial data to make informed farm management decisions, one must ensure they are properly implementing yield monitors so the correct decisions are made. Yield monitors are excellent tools to conduct field-scale research and spatially document yield differences across fields. Yield maps can identify issues within fields where low yields exist, support the implementation of site-specific management, and make comparisons between varieties, seed treatments, and new management practices.  However, data needs to be collected over whole fields or several fields in order to obtain a sufficient amount of yield data to make the right decision(s) for your farm.

Caution is extended for those using yield monitors to harvest variety trials or plot-scale studies. While this data can provide useful information and support plot-scale work,yield monitors are not a replacement for weigh wagons which should be used to obtain and compute yields for making comparisons in plots. Variety trials and plot studies are generally too small (100, 300 or even up to 900-ft long) in order for yield monitors to accurately measure the accumulated yield over 1 or 2 passes.  The potential errors of yield monitors in these small areas are too high.  Therefore, a measured +/- 5 bushel difference might not really exist between treatments being compared.  While proper calibration is always recommended for yield monitors and the calibration process indicates only a few percent error, the error in yield data generated will be higher for plot size studies and can actually be in the range of 10% to 20%.  For field-scale yield data, these errors will be “averaged” out and the mean yield for a treatment (e.g. variety) can be accurate (1% to 5% error depending upon operating conditions).

As an example, lets say a yield monitor has an actual error of 5%.  If yields are running around 150 bu/ac for the plots, then a 7.5 bu/ac error exists,  Therefore, greater than a 7.5 bu/ac difference must be measured before a variance can be concluded between treatments.  Further, if the actual error is 10% or 20%, then a 15 and 30 bu/ac difference, respectively must exist before any substantial conclusions can be drawn saying one treatment is better than the other.  In any of these cases, one cannot say that one treatment is better than the other if only a 3 or 5 bu/ac difference was measured; a weigh wagon would be required to indicate whether such a few bushel difference.

Remember, while yield monitors can provide useful information for small-scale studies, they are not a replacement for weigh wagons.  Solely relying on yield monitors for providing the necessary performance data at this scale, can lead to incorrectly analyzed yield differences and ultimately the wrong conclusion or management decisions being made. Yield monitors are excellent tools to support management decisions but must be used properly.

German company RapidEye, the only geospatial solutions provider to own and operate a constellation of five identical Earth Observation satellites, announced today that over a period of just three months, 95% of the contiguous United States has been imaged. Almost 80% of this imagery was captured by the RapidEye satellites with less than ten percent cloud cover.

The campaign, which began May 1 and was completed on July 31, produced an abundance of imagery with many areas covered multiple times. Not only the United States was covered; 97% of Mexico was collected and almost 60% of Canada. Many areas were imaged more than once over this three month span and totaled 17 Million square kilometers of North America. All of this imagery is currently available for purchase in the RapidEye Library.

The company also has released a success story with the French precision farming company S2Bvisio about how RapidEye has delivered nitrogen fertilization maps for canola and wheat fields for the customer. You will find details about this project at http://www.rapideye.de/upload/documents/References/Customer_Reference_S2B_08_06_2009_ENG.pdf.

RapidEye images the Earth in unparalleled quantities and will continue to make its satellite imagery available through its Library, which can be searched either through a local distributor or directly through its Customer Service department. To find a distributor visit the RapidEye website at www.rapideye.de/distributors. Additionally, a selection of RapidEye products can be searched for, purchased and immediately downloaded through the RapidEye Geodata Kiosk at www.geodatakiosk.com.

To help growers in the UK adapt to changes in EU pesticide regulations, the British government is funding applied R&D on over 30 innovative projects, including precsion weed mapping.

According to a report in Science Business, one of the projects that has won funding in this first tranche of grants, entitled ‘Automating weed mapping in arable fields for precision farming’ involves four companies, Masstock Arable UK Ltd, Knight Farm Machinery Ltd, Patchwork Technology Ltd, Syngenta Crop Protection UK, working with Reading University.

The aim is to develop a global positioning system-linked computer-controlled digital camera system that can be mounted on farm machinery, such as tractors, sprayers or combine harvesters, to map and geo-reference weeds such as black-grass, which occur in patches in arable crops.  A machine vision system using digital cameras will be linked to image analysis software, to identify the weeds present and estimate their densities.

Benefits of the system include reducing the cost of weed control to the farmer, cutting herbicide use and the early detection of herbicide resistance.

Taking into account contributions from the companies that are taking part, the total value of the R&D is in excess of £25 million.  The thirty two consortia will bring together over 100 companies, research establishments and other organisations.

Technology Strategy Board Chief Executive Iain Gray said the grants are the first made under the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Innovation Platform, which aims to bring government, business and researchers together to stimulate the development of new technologies that will increase food productivity, while decreasing the environmental impact of the food and farming industries.

The Sustainable Agriculture & Food Innovation Platform will invest up to £90 million over the next five years in projects and initiatives across the agri-food sector, focusing on areas such as crop productivity, sustainable livestock production and the reduction of food chain waste and greenhouse gas emissions.