The term precision farming is being used a lot lately around farm circles. What does it mean?
I've attended a couple of conferences on precision farming and heard from extension specialists, agribusiness people and farmers who are using various precision agriculture tools. But the best definition or explanation came from a sophomore student at an Future Farmers of America District Speech Contest I helped judge.
The student likened precision farming to being a medical doctor. If I am ill and go into a doctor's office to find out how to get better, I assume the doctor will take my temperature, check my pulse rate, look down my throat, listen to my lungs, and ask several questions before making a diagnosis of what is wrong with me. Then the doctor will prescribe what I need to do to get better. Doctors don't treat every patient the same way or prescribe the same remedies for everyone. Every patient is unique.
Well, every field is unique. Each field has soil with various qualities, slope variations, moisture variations and differences in past cropping histories. Even within individual fields, there can be differences.
The speech student was right. Why not treat each field individually by doing a thorough check of its condition, then prescribing how it needs to be treated to make it as "healthy" as can be?
Doing a 'checkup'
So, how can we do a "checkup" on our fields? Here are some suggestions you might want to consider.
Soil testing is a place to start. A question being debated by precision farming advocates is how many samples need to be taken in each field. Intense soil sampling is called grid sampling. How small of a grid do you need to use? How many samples can you afford? There is still a lot of debate on this question, but we are seeing some research done to try to determine what is financially economical.
One suggestion is to utilize a soil survey map to determine where you have some soil-type changes and do each soil type separately. This is a good minimum place to start. The Douglas County Soil Conservation District provides funds to help pay for up to 10 soil samples per landowner. Contact the district or our extension office for details.
Utilize your soil survey to find out what kinds of soils are in your fields, whether there are any moisture problems with the soils, and what their potential crop yields might be.
If you have a yield monitor, you can get yield maps for the fields. You can use these to see where the crops were good and where your yields were low, which may indicate a problem in a specific field area.
Using the information
These tools will become more useful as you accumulate several years of data. You will need to keep some kind of records concerning rainfall with the yield maps, because low yields can show up from both too much or too little water.
Once we have assessed the "diagnostic health" of our fields, what are some possible management decisions we can make? Varying the rates of fertilizer is a good place to start. I have seen the financial figures from two farmers who showed that they paid for their intense grid soil sampling just by variable-rate application of lime. More and more variable-rate fertilizer applicators are becoming available at our fertilizer dealers. This technology makes sense.
Another possible use of diagnostic records would be to determine where you might need tile lines to help drain wet spots.
Variable-rate seeding may be applicable if you have a big variance in your soil types and quality. Sometime in the future we may be able to utilize variable-rates data for applications of herbicides or insecticides, which will save money and be good for the environment.
While we are in the beginning or research stage of precision agriculture, I believe it will become financially beneficial to our farmers in the near future.
Who knows? Maybe someday we will put "Dr." in front of farmer.
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