Precision farming in Saskatchewan agriculture is being driven by retailers. The large majority of farmers, even many of those often on the cutting edge, have taken a wait and see attitude to purchasing GPS and yield monitors. One group of farmers has decided to be proactive and see what precision farming can do for them. They belong to the Northeast Agricultural Research Foundation (NARF).
The brochure NARF puts out explains that their broader scope is to encourage, direct and manage the development and operation of agriculture research for producers in Northeast Saskatchewan. But at the present their research priority is to evaluate the use of precision farming tools for conducting on farm research. The farmers on the management board have been focusing on running GPS yield monitors to produce yield maps of their farms for the last two cropping seasons.
They have also begun to evaluate returns to the use of fungicides in both cereals and canola with GPS yield monitors. 3 treated and 3 untreated test strips were run in each field. Last June looked like prime weather patterns for a return to fungicides but July turned around to be hot and dry. Yield maps indicated the only response to fungicides was found on Harrington barley. Here an approximate 15 bu/ac yield response is reported.
One of the interesting findings was the confidence expressed in the yield monitor results. Yield monitor results were checked with weigh wagon yields. As long as the monitors were accurately calibrated yields reported by the monitors were within 1.5% of the weigh wagon yields on strips larger than 2 acres.
These results ought to excite any farmer seriously interested in evaluating returns to crop inputs. The logistics of putting out 6 strips in any one field is not too burdensome for many input evaluations even during busy seasons especially if they can be located with GPS. And the types of inputs that might be evaluated is numerous. One of the problems of course is other variables such as weather that reduce the repeatability of results.
The NARF Management Board recognizes this problem and sees the need to do as much ground truthing as possible during the growing season to authenticate yield monitor results. This means a lot of field walking which some day may be able to be done with photographic or other types of imagery. It also means that some record of weather on site, at very least rainfall, must be kept.
One of the biggest assets precision farmers could have is cooperation among themselves by compiling results. Research scientists increase the accuracy of their trials by putting out greater numbers of trials to give them more site years of data. If farmers could do the same by comparing yield data among themselves coupled with good ground truthing and weather data, more accurate patterns of response could be establish much quicker.
NARF facilitates this exchange of results for its farmer and has been generally ready to share its findings with the farming public. There are still a lot of hurdles to overcome for precision farming to become adopted by Saskatchewan farmers but NARF along with all of the other research initiatives continue to discover the pieces and pull them together.