The Value of Precision Farming Tools

Kurt LawtonConservation, Education, Fertilizer, Planting, Spraying, sustainability

Successful Farming recently compiled various statistics on how precision farming pays, based on the experience of some farmers and university experts. Check out this story from it’s special summer 2010 issue, where they highlighted such benefits as:

  • Strip till and RTK guidance saves a huge amount of hours and fuel savings, while delivering big conservation and environmental benefits.
  • Planter clutches can save 3-7% in seed costs.
  • Banding P&K can reduce rates as much as 40%.
  • Spray boom section control can save 5-15% in input costs.

Precision Ag Expo Touts Variable Rate Technology

Kurt LawtonEducation, Events, Fertilizer, Planting, Remote sensing, Satellite, seed, Variable rate

Producers came to learn at the recent Precision Ag Expo field days held recently in North Dakota. Numerous questions, according to a story in Farm & Ranch Guide, aimed at gathering facts about zone maps, satellite imagery and variable rate precision farming.

Kelly Sharpe, of GK Technology, Inc., in Halstad, Minn., said his company creates variable rate mapping, taking an image from a field and creating zones based off of this input image.

Zones are soil sampled and fertilizing and seeding maps are created. The producer receives a prescription that he can input into his GPS system to apply fertilizer and seed at the correct rates while traveling across the field.

“Economics has forced us to make more money off the same acres,” Sharpe said. “There’s a lot of variability in every field caused by topography and soil types. Maps can show you where there might be more leaching of nitrogen or different soil types requiring different treatments.”

“You could put 30 pounds of nitrogen on the top of your hills and 90 pounds on the bottom of your valleys and it might not be accurate,” he said. Zone mapping is the solution to putting on the right amounts, and it can be done “right from the cab,” Sharpe said.

Check out this piece to learn more about the benefits of satellite imagery and variable rate manure application.

Precision.AgWired.com: Ecological Intensification Key to Meeting Future World Food Needs

John DavisAg Leader, Audio, ICPA, Precision Pays Podcast

Precision.AgWired.com Podcast

In this edition of the Precision.AgWired.com Podcast, sponsored by Ag Leader Technology, we listen in on one of the sessions at the recent International Conference on Precision Agriculture held in Denver, Colorado.

Dr. Ken Cassman with the University of Nebraska’s Center for Energy Sciences Research told the standing-room-only crowd that if you look at the past 40 years of farming and extrapolate those increases to the next 40 years, food production will still fall short, putting the world’s population … estimated to be 9.2 billion people by the year 2050 … and the world’s food supply on a crash course. He says estimates are that agriculture will have to increase production by 1.75 percent a year. Right now the numbers are closer to about a 1.3 percent increase. And Cassman says world agriculture will have to meet that increasing demand without negatively impacting the water supplies, nutrients, and wildlife of this planet.

So what’s the solution? Increased biotechnology to get more out of crops? Cassman says while biotechnology has increased yields somewhat, there’s no good, hard scientific evidence it will be able to meet the growing demands. He believes the real solution is meeting a food crop’s true genetic potential through something he calls Ecological Intensification.

It’s a fascinating conversation, and you can hear more of it in the player below below. [wpaudio url=”http://zimmcomm.biz/precision/precision-podcast-11.mp3″ text=”Precision.AgWired.com Podcast”]

You can subscribe to the Precision.AgWired.com Podcast here.

Kentucky Farmer of the Year Relies on Precision

Kurt LawtonConservation, Equipment, Farmers, sustainability

Joe Nichols has evolved from watching his parents lose their farm when he was 17, to building a highly diversified 19,000-acre farm near Cadiz, KY. A recent story in theleafcronicle.com offers a fascinating look at his Seven Springs Farms. In that piece he highlights his precision farming emphasis on input savings as well as environmental protection.

He makes extensive use of precision farming technology. For instance, he uses variable rate planting, determined by soil type. “Soil type reflects the water holding capacity of the soil,” he says.

“Some soils are more productive than others, and the more productive soils get the higher plant populations. In sports terms, we play defense with our less productive fields and play offense with our more productive soils.”

He also uses global positioning and auto-steering on his equipment for swath control during planting, spraying and applying fertilizer. “This cuts down on over applying and wasting money,” he says. “We strive to protect the environment and be the best stewards of the land and water that we can be.”

As a result of his success as a row crop farmer, Nichols has been selected as the 2010 Kentucky winner of the Swisher Sweets/Sunbelt Expo Southeastern Farmer of the Year award.

“The goal I started with was to build an operation from scratch that could someday be viewed as one of the best, well-managed farming operations in North America,” he says. “This overarching goal is what drives me each day.”

Read the entire story.

Precision.AgWired.com has iPhone App

Cindy ZimmermanGeneral, Industry News

Energy.AgWired.comIf you have an iPhone and would like to get Precision.AgWired.com posts fast and easy on it, there’s now an app for that. ZimmComm New Media this week introduced the Agwired iPhone app that allows quick access to all of ZimmComm’s on-line publications, including Precision.AgWired.com. The app is now available for iPhone users to download, free of charge, in the Apple iTunes store.

The app offers one-touch access to all the latest news and information in the agribusiness and agricultural marketing world posted on Agwired.com, including audio, photos and video, and connections to other ZimmComm news sites. The AgWired App features a news tab drop down menu to select ZimmComm News Network feeds as well as individual news on AgWired.com by category.

“Apps just make on-line access from an iPhone quicker and easier,” said ZimmComm president Chuck Zimmerman. “We wanted to be the first to develop an iPhone application to show that it can be done and that there is a demand for this new technology tool in the agricultural world.”

ZimmComm owns and operates four web-based news sites that are now accessible from the new iPhone app: Agwired, focused on news from the world of agribusiness; Energy.AgWired.com, which is all about renewable energy – from ethanol and biodiesel to wind and solar; Animal.AgWired.com for the dairy industry; and Precision.AgWired.com, which focuses on information about precision agriculture technology.

Adoption of Precision Farming Technology

Kurt LawtonEquipment, Farmers, sustainability

The technology of precision agriculture has long outpaced the agronomics needed to prove its investment value, but we’re a lot closer today than we were 10 years ago.

I read a recent piece by DTN agronomist Dan Davidson, written during the recent International Conference on Precision Ag in Denver, Colo. He stated, “But what is interesting is how the use of yield monitor data, grid soil sampling and variable fertilizer application hasn’t changed much in two decades with only about 20% adoption. But the introduction of lightbar navigation (80+% adoption), assisted steering and section control really showed farmers that there were benefits from adopting the right technology.”

Sure, this is oversimplification of a lot of complex factors, but we’re also dealing with a larger percentage of farmers near, at, or beyond retirement age who, most often, seek simplicity and reduced investment. One look at the light-speed adoption of glyphosate-resistant crops is one example this simplicity model. (Although that simplicity is now resulting in greater management due to resistant weeds.)

Yes, precision farming technology is complex, and turning data into sound management practices that improve the bottom line often takes hired experts, in the same vein as why crop scouts are hired. But make no mistake, the profitability of certain technologies has improved dramatically in the past 10 years. It just takes hard work by a grower to find what can pay on a given farm.

Growers wouldn’t pay $300 for a unit of seed corn if they didn’t see the value. They just have to work harder and smarter when it comes to investing in precision agriculture technology. But that process is getting easier.

Nebraska Extension Launches Precision Ag Course

Kurt LawtonEducation, Farmers, Resources, Retailers, sustainability, University

Are you navigating your precision agriculture technologies and using data to their fullest extent? A new three-day program offered by University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension, Precision Agriculture Practicum, is designed to help participants gain practical experience using their own field data in hands-on exercises. And you’ll have the opportunity to network with each other while collaborating on team projects.

Who should attend?
– Farmer operators wishing to get more return on their precision ag dollar investment.
– Crop consultants and industry agronomists who desire to provide more accurate information and better service to their customers.
– Corporate industry and government agency personnel needing to know and understand the technology being used in today’s production agriculture.
– Precision ag instructors.

The inaugural Late Season Session is scheduled for August 31 through September 2 at the UNL Ag Research & Development Center near Mead, Neb. Curriculum includes:
• Introduction to equipment used at UNL’s Agricultural
Research and Development Center and site-specific
management capacity; introduction to case study
fields
• Entry points to GPS auto-guidance, yield monitoring
progressing to yield mapping, Google Earth, aerial
imagery, county soil survey, Web Soil Survey, recordkeeping
• GPS principles
• Yield monitoring/mapping principles; data filtering
• Variable rate technology and control systems
optimizing autosteer and swath control.
• On-the-go soil sensing
• Collection of active crop canopy sensor data
• Develop N recommendations
• Aerial and satellite imagery
• Group exercises

Winter Session is scheduled for December 2010, with date and location yet to be determined.

Learn more at http://ardc.unl.edu/precisionagpracticum/

Enrollment is limited so act soon!

Judging Your Crops from the Combine Seat

Kurt LawtonAg Leader, Displays, Harvesting, Insights Weekly, Software

Insights WeeklyAfter a season spent trying to protect yield, we all know the view from the combine seat is judgment day for hybrids, varieties and assorted management decisions. Watching that yield monitor as you open up fields gets more focused viewership than the alma mater versus the big rival on a football Saturday.

Like flat screen TVs, precision ag monitors keep getting better with more features. Thanks to software improvements, you can even watch yields as they shift among hybrid locations in the field. Ag Leader recently upgraded their SMS desktop software so it can import planting data from various planter monitor brands to export as reference files to the INTEGRA display.

“The SMS software’s ability to translate data from almost any brand of planter monitor and export it into our INTEGRA display is a great tool, as it allows the varieties to show up as different colors during harvest on the display, as well as to be used for variety tracking,” says Corey Weddle, director of software solutions for Ag Leader.

Before, if two monitors were used to plant and only one of those monitors is used for harvest, you couldn’t combine the planting data from both monitors into one. “SMS Basic and SMS Advanced Version 10.0 software can handle that task,” he says. “And it’s a simple, straight forward process to export the data.”

Read more about it here: http://precision.agwired.com/2010/07/watch-hybrid-and-variety-harvest-results-in-real-time/

Visit these links for more information.

SMS Software http://www.agleader.com/products/software/

INTEGRA http://www.agleader.com/products/integra/

Yield Monitoring http://www.agleader.com/products/yield-monitor/

North Dakota Precision Ag Expo Videos Worth Watching

Kurt LawtonEducation, Events, Farmers, GPS, Research

Special coverage of two recent Precision Ag Expo days, in Casselton and Dickenson, N. Dak., has been documented by Farm & Ranch Guide–and the webpage includes educational videos of numerous presentations. Both field days were hosted by North Dakota State University Extension Service.

You can learn about site specific hardware, history of GPS, GPS system choices, accuracy of GPS, LIDAR technology and drainage, satellite imagery, precision ag adoption in ND, and much more.

Check it out!!

SMS Software Now For Mobile PC Devices

Kurt LawtonAg Leader, Company Announcement, Software

Ag Leader expands on its mobile SMS software platform to make it work on larger-screen portable PC devices for field data capture.

SMS Mobile PC is the latest way to utilize SMS Mobile software. This newest SMS software product enables the support of SMS Mobile for portable PC devices, including netbooks, tablets and laptop computers; the product can be utilized on any device running a Windows operating system – XP, Vista, or Windows 7.

SMS Mobile PC offers another way for growers to collect information in the field that can flow between their mobile device and their SMS desktop software. Utilizing SMS Mobile on a netbook, tablet or laptop gives users the ability to see more information on one screen.

“SMS Mobile PC puts SMS Mobile on a larger screen so you can adjust the size of windows and their location on the screen to match the way you want to work,” says Corey Weddle, Director of Software Solutions. “The new portable PC device support allows for higher screen resolution, larger buttons, faster processing and more memory than the traditional SMS Mobile PDA version.”

SMS Mobile PC provides five field operations in which a user can record data: Boundary, Soil Sampling, Crop Scouting, Coverage Logging and General Logging. Ag Leader Technology offers industry leading customer support, and all SMS products are backed by our software-dedicated support team.