“When corn is $3 a bushel, growers have got to start asking questions. It isn’t business as usual.”
Precision agriculture is one tool that can help farmers get the most bang for their buck especially when it comes to managing input costs, according to Keith Glewen, Nebraska Extension educator in Saunders County.
Researchers and growers in Nebraska and Illinois, as well as others across North and South America are part of a 4-year research project called Data-Intensive Farm Management.
They are gathering data to help farmers find variances within a field to help calibrate planter and fertilizer equipment. These calibrations then plant and fertilize specific areas a certain way. All to hopefully increase yields, while lowering input costs by using the data in their management decisions.
“In a given field, a corn field as an example, variability exists and some of it is the result of soil differences which influence water holding capacity, nutrient availability and the list goes on and on,” Glewen said. “Some of the differences are man-made.”
They also can learn how to conduct on-farm research using tools they already possess, said Joe Luck, University of Nebraska precision ag engineer. In this particular project they’ve focused on variable-rate seeding and nitrogen trials to help get closer to optimum rates. When optimum rates are reached maximum economic yield could be realized in the field.
“One of the nice things about the project is that our cooperators are using their own equipment to put the studies in place, so they’re able to gain valuable information about their own management system,” Luck said.
Glewen said whether farmers like it or not, they have been conducting their own research for years and many have been making management decisions based on poor information. Many weren’t evaluating their management practices correctly when performing their own “research”.
“There is variability in their management of inputs, which in some cases they weren’t accounting for and subsequently they were making inferences or decisions based on inaccurate information,” Glewen said.
Luck said they’re hoping to understand where current nitrogen use-efficiencies are across Nebraska.
“Our hope is that the grower cooperators learn the most about their field(s) and their production system,” he said. “It will be important for producers to learn how to continually test their crop input strategies to make sure they’re optimizing economic productivity and this project will give them knowledge of how to make that work.”
The DIFM project’s primary interest is more from an extension perspective, “teaching folks how to make more use out of these technologies and the data generated from them.”
Luck thinks these kinds of technologies are here to stay.
“As we see increasing demands for more sustainable ag production systems (more efficient use of our crop inputs), it will be important for growers to benchmark how they’re crop management system works as well as measure changes from year to year,” he said.
User friendly technologies help producers accomplish their goals. In the end, growers need to minimize environmental impacts while optimizing economic returns on their farm.
“There is value in the data being generated at the farm level and the growers certainly need to realize benefits from those datasets,” Luck said.
Project specifics
David Bullock, professor, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois, detailed the DIFM project. Researchers are using “very large scale field trials,” by dividing up an 80- or 160-acre field into plots that are much shorter than usual strip trials.
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“That gives us a lot more observations,” Bullock said.
Precision technology is used to apply nitrogen or control the seeding rate randomly in the field. Then, yield monitors are used to record yield.
“There’s a lot more to it than that, but basically what we’re getting is very little bother to the farmer,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of data relatively inexpensively.”
And the best part of it is the data generated is specific to the exact location.
“The farmer gets advice from data that comes right from the farmer’s own field,” Bullock said.
Examples of data they can collect include: nitrogen amounts, yields, soil statistics, soil characteristics, organic matter readings, electro-conductivity readings, elevation, slope readings and weather data. Having the larger plots allowing researchers to make more conclusions, thus helping the farmer achieve their objectives.
Bullock said, for example, many producers have a “commercial prescription” for how much nitrogen to put down. They plug this information into their laptop or iPad on the farm equipment and apply nitrogen accordingly.
“We’re able to look and see if that prescription makes them any money or not,” Bullock said. “We can look at the whole thing statistically and we can tell them whether they’re getting good advice.”
Crop consultants can benefit from the data as well.
“Certainly they want to know if they’re giving good advice,” he said. “We can help them know if they’re giving good advice.”
The DIFM project is in its third year in 2018. In 2016 there were six trials—two in Nebraska and four in Illinois. In 2017, there were 23 trials in five states. Eighteen trials were performed in Argentina with cooperating researchers there.
“This year it’s looking like we might near 100 trials,” he said. “We’re gathering the data and we can analyze the data for each individual farm, or we can analyze the data all together.”
The project is exciting for Bullock and his colleagues, as well as the farmers.
“We feel like we’re getting data that just no one’s had before and getting it rapidly and we’re getting it from farmer’s own farms,” he said. “The cooperative farmers are enjoying the research process and not being too bothered by the whole thing.”
They hope to continue the project after securing more research funding when the current funding runs out. Bullock feels as thought they’ve created value and are giving producers information that’s profitable for them.
“We think there’ll be a lot of demand for it,” Bullock said. “I think its kind of revolutionary–a way to start getting data, agronomic experiment data.”
Funded by USDA NIFA-AFRI Food Security Program, the project’s participating universities are University of Nebraska, University of Illinois, University of Kentucky, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Maryland, Illinois State University and University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.
Kylene Scott can be reached at [email protected] or 620-227-1804.
