If a producer processes 40,000 items of data and finds only 800 are correct, is that information garbage?
CALGARY — Average yield numbers can give producers wrong information about what’s going on in their fields and lead to wrong management decisions.
“Most farmers will look at the average grain yield and will try to push the envelope the next year by making some ad hoc adjustments to their management,” Colorado State University researcher Raj Khosla told the Tactical Farming Conference in Calgary earlier this winter.
“GIS analysis has shown that a 100-acre field with 40,000 pixels will often have fewer than two percent of the pixels that match the numerical average yield of the field,” Khosla said.
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The old computer adage about garbage in-garbage out also applies to field management, he added.
“Even if we increase the standard deviation 15 bushels plus or minus, up and down both directions, we would still have only one third of the pixels matching the average grain yield number for the whole field. That tells us these average yield numbers are garbage.
“Today we have the technology to quantify the variability on your fields. We should quit managing according to average yield and focus on the variability and the limiting factors causing that variability.”
He said most producers and agronomists focus solely on average yields because that’s where the money is found. However, it doesn’t encourage them to look for the hidden factors inhibiting better yields within each pixel.
“For example, if soil texture is limiting your yield in a certain area of the field, adding more nitrogen won’t help that area,” he said.
“If soil texture is allowing your nitrogen to flush 10 feet down into the earth, then adding nitrogen is of no consequence.”
Khosla said the answer in many cases is to either take those areas out of grain production and put them into forages or spoon feed the crop with in-crop additions of nitrogen throughout the growing season.
“You’ll have to go on that ground multiple times, feeding the crop a few pounds at a time, drop by drop, but you have to know whether or not it’s economically viable.”
For more information, contact Khosla at raj.khosla@colostate.edu.
