Having just spent most of June in the UK and Europe on a
tour organised by CB Norwood, looking into Precision Ag, I thought I’d give an
overview of what I saw of interest.
The tour group consisted of a great mix of farmers,
contractors, CB Norwood’s managers, from both the South and North Island, Tim
Myers (CB Norwood CEO), myself and was run by Paul Collins (CB Norwood Partnership Development Manager) - hats off to him for an excellent
job managing the whole event and his team back in NZ.
The first week was spent in the UK, going around farms and
visiting the Cereals event near Duxford. There was a real mix of farms from the
traditional Estates, to new corporate farms less than 10 years old with huge
areas 15,000+ hectares. From the precision ag point of view, it was interesting
to see that we are all using the same technologies but for different reasons.
EM surveys are used to identify different soil management zones as they are
here, but not for irrigation and with little use of the topography data
collected at the same time. EM was used for variable intensity of cultivating,
and a lot for variable rate seeding. The EM zones are identified and then the
soils classified into percentage establishment zones, so then according to your
thousand grain seed weight and total population your seed required was
automatically adjusted. This combined with using the EM to highlight areas of
potentially higher blackgrass burdens - they find much higher levels on heavy
soils identified from the EM maps, so they drill at higher seed rates areas to compete with the blackgrass more.
Using variable rate seeding and cultivations the farmers where going far more
even looking crops, suppressing the blackgrass marginally more and getting up to
8% increase in yield.
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| Image 1: Winter wheat VR seed rate from an EM map. |
The EM maps where being used in combination with combine
harvester yield maps to create zones for zonal soil sampling rather than grid
soil sampling. The advantage there was that you had less samples than grid
sampling, so it was cheaper, and you took samples in transects from within each
soil zone from the EM map. Most of these farms have no livestock and the fields
have been the same size under the same management for a good length of time,
which lends itself more to zonal soil sampling.
There was a greater spread use of variable nitrogen from
either satellite imagery, drones, N sensor/GreenSeeker type sensors than in New
Zealand. The farmers had to use their nitrogen smarter as they had strict limits
and timing limitations. This was apparent at the Cereals event on the Yara and
Horsch stands to name but two both showing their own real-time sensors.
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| Image 2: N sensor for real-time VR nitrogen application |
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| Image 3: The Horsch biomass sensor, also for VR N |
At Cereals every machinery company seemed to be developing
or had its own self propelled sprayer option, from the very basic offering to
the other end of the spectrum the Horsch sprayer with its incredible boom
technology on the pro plus and nozzle setup, allowing it to follow the crop at
a height of just 30cm even on contoured land and almost making it wind proof
spraying – with a climate like the UK one, you need to be able to spray at
every opportunity you can!
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| Image 4: The soil pit - a great way to compare root structure in different scenarios |
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| Image 5: There are many different software options in the UK for field inputs and collecting layers of data for smarter farming |
It was great to catch up with Jim Wilson and the team from
Soil Essentials, one of the few Precision Ag companies who still had a stand at
the Cereals Event. The consensus on the Precision Ag front was that there are a
lot of interesting and innovative ideas in the pipeline, for growers to use,
which is very exciting.
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| Image 6: The Soil Essentials team |
All the companies seem to have started from various
positions within precision ag but come to the same conclusions on what works
best, all of which we are doing here too in New Zealand. Of all the cropping
farms there is probably about a 50% uptake in Precision Ag in various forms.
Most farms seem to use muck in some form or another to increase organic matter
and help with moisture constraints.
The last farm we went to in the UK, was the Beeswax Dyson
Farming, owned by the Dyson Company. They had bought over 15,000ha since 2011
and used EM surveys and drones to help them get up to speed on their various
soil types to manage them better. They were also heavily involved in environmental
schemes like some of the old traditional estates we saw.
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| Figure 7: Beeswax Dyson Farming, general storage shed |
In the next article I will discuss some of the interesting ideas that we came across in Europe.
Cheers,
Chris
