We farm 2500 acres south of Rosetown in the Brown and Dark Brown soil zone. Our current crops include durum and spring wheat, peas, lentils, canary seed, and canola. Garry, who's 59, and his wife Marlene, have taken off their 41st crop this year. Their son Stuart, who's 29, has been farming and working off farm for 10 years and is also a graduate of the School of Agriculture at the U of S. The three of us share the work load and management of the operation.
We have been using low disturbance direct seeding since 1985, when Garry purchased his first airseeder. Some of the farm has been continuous cropped since 1974 and is currently some of our best producing fields. Since 1989, the whole farm was put into a continuous crop rotation. The four-year rotation is pulse-cereal-pulse-cereal (peas-durum-lentil-canary seed). Canola is currently being added slowly to the rotation as our experience with it grows.
We began using precision farming in 1996 with the purchase of a Case IH combine with the Advanced Farming System (AFS). Garry is a pilot and had previous experience using a Global Positioning System in his airplane. When he saw the AFS system for the first time he knew that it would be an immediate benefit to our operation. In an unusual twist from tradition, it was the father that convinced the son that a new technology should be incorporated into the operation and the combine was purchased.
There are many misconceptions about yield monitors that we have run into in the last three years. Many have dismissed it as a toy. Some feel that it is too expensive to justify the cost. Our experience is that it has become an integral part of our operation and future combines on our farm will definitely have one. As inputs increase in cost and grain decreases in price, we are using precision farming to improve the bottom line. We are purposely proceeding slowly. In the last three years we have been bombarded with information about our fields and are taking our time to adjust to having this information available. Again, as inputs increase in price, mistakes become more costly.
From the start our approach to precision farming was to gather yield and soil test data for 4 to 5 years before we started variable rate seeding or fertilizing. We have done this for two reasons:
The SSCA says that the conversion to direct seeding begins with the combine and we believe the same holds true for precision farming. The yield data is the report card of our farming operation and the foundation of our precision farming program. Our next step will be to soil sample our fields in 5-acre grids. We will then use the soil sample results along with the yield data to write a "prescription" for the seed and fertilizer rates. As well, with the help of the PFRA, we started using infrared photos this year to monitor crop health during the growing season. The infrared photos give us another tool to identify the severity of pest infestations and nutrient deficiencies. We view precision farming as a systems approach to crop management.
Once the initial fascination of seeing the yield maps wore off, we could see patterns develop in our fields. Some examples of things we've seen in our yield maps are:
Sceptics would say that you don't need a yield monitor to see these examples, which is true. But the advantage of the yield monitor is to be able to sit down and quantify the yield loss or gain from an operation. By comparing to check strips, we can tell if an application of herbicide paid for itself. We then know for future applications, what the economic threshold is for that particular weed species, population and herbicide. By looking at eroded knolls, we can tell if an application of fertilizer improved yields.
To sum up our experience with precision farming, it has made us better managers. We scout our crops more and we're anxious to see the results from the management decisions that we make. We both are optimistic that precision farming will help our farm stay viable in poor economic times. Precision farming will allow us to allocate our inputs to the areas that require them instead of wasting inputs on areas that won't benefit.