Precision Farming offers us many opportunities to use new technologies to better manage crop production. I had previously talked about key technologies and costs associated with various pieces of equipment. I also suggested you should try to attend one or more of the many seminars and training sessions offered across the country to help you get more comfortable on how to proceed. Many simple methods exist to help or even take the place of some of the more expensive analyses that are needed to get the important data you will end up with. These included aerial photos, soil maps, field tractor notes, harvest data from past years, etc.
Some of the important advantages of precision farming include getting more information about your fields so you can make more educated decisions (identify the best areas and the worst areas), Maximizing your returns (reduce or redirect your inputs can result in both reduced input costs and increased yields), and even protecting your environment (a decrease in overall inputs needed to sustain high crop yields).
Precision Farming has applications in:
yield monitoring at harvest time to target your best areas
target disease sections of a field for future use,
identify weed areas for future spraying operations so you only have to go and spray those areas and not the entire field, thus saving you tons of money,
identify rocks or other features for considerations,
variable rate fertilizer or seed application to produce the maximum yields on those pieces of ground that are proven producers,
at spraying time the technology can help prevent overlaps or misses and save you a considerable amount of money.
To answer those pitfall questions I posed last time:
Can I justify the expense? A.- How do you know that if you spend $8-$12,000 in yield monitoring that the equipment will be worth anything in the next 2 years? I don't think any of it is really economical now but it is becoming more so all the time. Your best bet is to look for equipment that you can adapt, adopt and improve. rather than get trapped into a long term expensive system that doesn't mesh well with other manufacturers stuff.
Will it pay on your farm? A.- Depends on the size of your operation. Larger farmers can equalize the expense across more acres than you. Larger fields also stand to have more variability than your smaller ones. you judge.
How fast do I jump in or How do I start? A.-You don't need to jump in with both feet. Start with one component such as the combine monitor and work into the others parts on a gradual basis. Just remember to calibrate the monitor properly and study the system you are buying to be sure it will adapt to spraying and variable rate application at a later date and be compatible with other equipment not necessarily from the same manufacturer.
Will the price of the technology drop? and Have I done my homework? A.-Typically the prices do drop as more units become available however high tech equipment has a rather limited market and prices will likely remain relatively firm for some time. You can buy a so called complete system for all pieces of your farm equipment from one company for the purposes of printing yield maps for about $10,000, or you could put together your own design system for less. The trade off is that you will have to spend a lot more time in research.
Is the equipment user friendly? Is the equipment compatible? How fast will it change? A.- Good questions all. The key here is to look at the ease of use in the field. You don't want to spend a lot of time making adjustments to the equipment in the field, especially at your very busiest time. You usually have enough to do just concentrating on doing a proper job of just operating the machine. This is where it is pretty critical to be able to extract the data and take it to your office in the house to store or at least archive the data for future use without the worry of thinking whether the data might get lost or not be able to be read by another machine and wind up being totally useless. Look at a package with a lot of flexibility so you can import and export information with other software programs. Remember that you own the data, so it is important to preserve the raw data on a diskette so you will be able to plug it into future software.
Keep on making field or tractor notes as you do your operations to check on the new technology. Don't try to do too many things at once in the initial stages until you are comfortable with the technology. If you vary the seeding rate or fertilizer rate across the field, make a pass every so often with a constant seeding rate. My concern with farmers adopting the new technology is that they may not know if it's any better than what they did before.