Farmers are accustomed to using prescription maps for fertilizer and crop protection products. Now, they can put those layers to use by making prescription maps for their tillage operations. Case has introduced prescription tillage technology as an option to its existing AFS Soil Command. The tillage prescription map is based on the various maps producers […] Read more
Tag Archives precision agriculture — page 3
Manage field data points every 20 feet
It’s a daunting challenge managing all data on 100,000 fields totalling 30 million cropped acres 24/7/365, but it’s a task performed routinely at the Farmers Edge technology centre in Lethbridge. The office is a busy place with more than 40 staff crunching data daily on every acre under contract, said Farmers Edge founder Curtis MacKinnon. […] Read more
Smart Sprayer IDs and kills weeds on sight
A Smart Sprayer, equipped with boom-mount cameras coupled to Xarvio image recognition technology, can identify 20 species of weeds and trigger a surgically precise herbicide blast to one specific weed. Conventional blanket field coverage dumps millions of litres of unneeded herbicide on millions of prairie acres, which represents a tremendous financial waste for farmers. As […] Read more
Precision ag struggling for full acceptance
Many new digital tools are not adopted yet as farmers wait to see a return on investment from technology
The term precision ag has been around for decades, and like other terms ubiquitously used, it can be difficult to know what someone means when they say it. To address this concern the board of the International Society for Precision Agriculture approved a definition of precision ag on June 20, which is as follows: “Precision […] Read more
Are airplanes taking over the hi-rez biz?
Veteran aerial photographers can roll out their trusty old Cessna 177 as leading precision ag mappers are dumping drone and satellite shots in favour of higher quality images from genuine piloted aircraft. The 177 has long been a favourite of aerial photographers. There’s no wing struts to get in the way of a good shot, […] Read more
Big data creates big opportunities
Many pieces of farm machinery have been capable of collecting and storing agronomy and production data for more than a decade. Extracting usable and attractive tools for producers from all that information has proven challenging. The development of cloud computing and data storage, as well as the internet of things in which objects including farm […] Read more
Free access to Canada Land inventory soil maps
The Canada Land Initiative and National Soil Database hold massive volumes of valuable agriculture information. Unfortunately, nobody could access it until agronomist Simon Knutson took matters into his own hands. The Manitoba entrepreneur didn’t like the idea that a valuable, publicly funded database was not available to the public. There were no legal restrictions on […] Read more
Farmer data brought into one house for better usability
FieldView is a software platform often used on an iPad that allows farmers to bring all of their agronomic information into one spot. It enables growers to visualize their information in new ways and allows them to find insights that are difficult to see when the data is in raw form. “If you’re thinking of […] Read more
Farmers Edge takes hands-on approach to big data
Data is automatically collected and processed from sources such as on-farm weather stations and farm equipment
Farmers Edge’s approach is hands-on and wide-ranging. “We go directly on to the farm and we install our canplug, which is our telemetry data capture device, in all four-wheel vehicles on the farm. We install weather stations across the grower’s farm, we take soil samples across the grower’s farm, as those are all critical information […] Read more
Big data might equal bigger profits
It sounds like the opening line of a lame joke: three economists walk into an agricultural trade show and … It isn’t a joke. It’s something that happened to Keith Coble, agricultural economist at Mississippi State University, when he attended the Commodity Classic, an annual event for American corn and soybean growers. Coble and two […] Read more
