The hardware required to precisely control applications of nutrients, seed and pest control products has been available since the early 1990s.
However, only a few parts of the technology’s capacity have been adopted.
Farmers attending a Southern Applied Research Council seeding seminar near Lethbridge in July told agronomist Ross McKenzie that most of them use satellite fed auto-steering on their machinery.
They were quick to adopt this form of precision agriculture because it allowed them to avoid overlapping and improve their agronomic practices without a lot of additional effort or investment.
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The farmers also told McKenzie that many of them have yield monitors in their combines.
However, he received the opposite response when he asked them whether they recorded yield data with their machines or just used the yield and moisture instruments as an in-the-moment harvest tool.
“Capturing data from yield monitors hasn’t caught on,” said Terry Griffen, an economist with the University of Arkansas who studies the adoption of technology on farms.
“Yield monitors bring in data that needs to be managed, while guidance makes life easier without extra work.”
He told the annual International Precision Agriculture Conference held in Denver, Colorado, last month that his American research has found farmers use combine monitoring for reasons that were different from what agricultural economists might have expected.
“At harvest, I thought it would have been yield readings for crop share use, but it wasn’t,” Griffen said.
“It was crop moisture for managing storage.”
Surveys conducted last year showed that only six percent of American producers who used GPS guidance also collected yield data.
Dennis Haak of Agriculture Canada told the precision agriculture conference that farmers see the immediate benefits of cost reductions in overlapping inputs and reduced operator fatigue.
George Morris Centre researchers in Guelph, Ont., have determined that precision agriculture can result in crop input savings of $5.10 per acre for canola and $3.20 for spring wheat.
However, farmers haven’t been nearly as accepting of new tools that vary the rates of application based on more advanced use of the technology, such as harvested yield analysis and satellite and aerial generated near infrared mapping.
Haak said farmers could also save money by measuring low levels of soil salinity using electromagnetic conductivity meters and then linking them to specific field locations, which would allow them to reduce input costs in those areas.
Garth Donald of Dynagra in Beiseker, Alta., said during the precision agriculture conference that western Canadian farmers are scratching only the surface of their potential savings and improved yields when it comes to the use of new site specific tools.
Curtis MacKinnon of Farmers’ Edge in Manitoba said producers took the first steps into precision agriculture because of the relative ease of integrating machinery guidance into their operations.
However, he thinks it will take other incentives to persuade them to commit more of their office time to variable rate application.
“The benefits are there and once producers start using the technology, most wouldn’t go back, similar to auto steer and guidance,” he said.
“Savings have to be combined with ease of use.”
Harold Reetz of Reetz Agronomics in Monticello, Illinois, said farmers will adopt variable rate and site specific technology at a more accelerated pace to accommodate the world’s increasing need for food, feed and fuel.
“Commodity prices are rising due to demand. Land is a finite resource. Price signals to farmers are to produce more and they will need the technology to accomplish it,” he said.
“Real-time, on-the-go sensors and rate controllers, often in conjunction with these geo-referenced data sets, put a new level of sophistication into site-specific crop production. Integration of multiple data layers along with real-time sensor data and historical production records is now possible … although still evolving as a decision tool.”
Reetz said farmers will soon be able to see variable crop genotypes for different soil types, potentially in the same fields.
“Networks reaching out from the office to the machine and back using telemetric tools are already here,” he said.
“Farmers will find new ways to save and make money and produce more.”
However, surveys have found that only 50 percent of U.S. farmers that use guidance tools plan to add variable rate applications.
Roger Mandel of Curtin University in Australia said farmers in his country are collecting data from yield monitors but most haven’t yet found efficient ways to manage it.
“It’s a matter of time for them,” Mandel said. “And higher commodity prices will help them find that time.”
He said farmers will also be encouraged to use precision agriculture by future U.S. legislation that contains elements of traceability for farm products and by international food markets that demand disclosure of production practices.
“Generally, farmers like the act of farming a lot more than they like record keeping,” Mandel said.
“Precision ag tools are good at record keeping, so that too might create adoption.”
However, producers might not have enough time to fully examine the data created by the new technology because of how quickly harvest moves.
“The season is short and it moves fast, even in the Midwest,” said Peter Kyveryga, who handles nutrient and crop performance research for the Iowa Soybean Association’s On Farm Network.
“Getting information from satellites, planes and soil and foliar testing is a challenge. Putting it to use that season is much more (so).”
Kyveryga said he often finds himself looking at late season aerial crop imagery for nitrogen results when it is too late to act to improve yields in that crop.
However, it is early enough to guide field evaluation on the ground and plan for fall soil tests of trouble spots or under-performing fields.
The benefit to farms comes once the soil and crop data are available.
Agriculture consultant Marc Vanacht works with large farms and has seen the benefits of site-specific management.
“It was complex and it made it expensive and difficult to adopt,” he told the Agconnect Conference in Florida earlier in this year.
“That is all changing. Smart companies are delivering new software and machinery tools. Consultants are able to set up systems to make use of it. And many farmers are now able to do this for themselves with a little support.
“The way they use machinery dealers for maintenance or upgrades they now can use these technologies. They are not as new as you might think.
“The world’s most sophisticated operators have used some of these for many years and they do it because it makes them money.… They save money on fertilizer, pesticides, water, labour and they grow more food per hectare. That’s what it’s about.”
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