Precision Ag update - a UK & Europe perspective - Part #1

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.

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.

Image 2: N sensor for real-time VR nitrogen application

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!

Image 4: The soil pit - a great way to compare root structure in different scenarios

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. 

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.

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 

Tips for Capturing Yield Data this Harvest

Do you have a yield monitor in your header? Do you use it? Do you want help to extract value from the data? These are some of the first questions we are asking growers this time of year. With the mad rush on to get the crop off the paddock the yield monitor is one thing that is easily forgotten and seldom used to its full potential. Many growers have paid for the technology but aren’t able to harness the power of the information that it provides.

Yield monitor showing real time recordings

One of the key points that isn’t stressed enough to growers that have yield monitors is that they should capture the data regardless if they want to use it or not. Having multiple years of data is immensely more useful than one year of data. Multiple years of data means results that have seasonality factors removed. This process is call normalisation. Data is put into a relative scale and is compared across the years. Once data is normalised then we are able to identify common zones or production areas. These zones can be marked for future management decisions.

The difference between raw and processed data. 

Processing or “cleaning” the data is the key to successfully utilising the captured data. Raw yield points have a large amount of errors and “noise” that can significantly impact on the results. With these noisy bits removed and tidied up the data becomes more representative of the paddock. Some of the factors that impact on the data accuracy are cut width, flow delay and travel distance errors.

A processed yield map

Yield data can also be useful for identifying problems during the actual harvest of the crop. In one example a grower saw the results of him harvesting grass seed in the hottest part of the day. He was able to spot the mistake as recorded yield dropped in the swaths that he completed in the hottest temperatures. Ultimately the yield information informed him that the decision had cost him.

Some tips to consider

• Make sure that the paddock names and IDs are correct on the monitor before you start the paddock.
• Utilise labels or tags to help identify different operations.
• Avoid overwriting data from previous years. Make sure that the data is separated by year.
• Back up the data regularly! Utilise the free cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Drive to save a copy. 

Yield data is the final measure of a seasons worth of effort. Yield data allows for insights into different management practices and the old adage “what gets measured gets managed” comes to mind.  

Post by Nick.

Raw vs processed image from http://extensionpublications.unl.edu/assets/pdf/ec2005.pdf

Efficient water management = successful cropping season

The 2015/16 cropping season saw a year that required a large amount of irrigation across most of the country due to the dry weather. If you weren’t using spray irrigation, variable rate irrigation (VRI) or measuring your soil moisture you probably ended up either over or under-doing the irrigation required for your pasture or crops. The more efficient an irrigation system, particularly this season the better off you would have been with maximising your return times and applying the right amount of irrigation for each crop.

Following harvest for the cropping guys we’ve certainly seen that more efficient irrigation methods (pivots and laterals and VRI) coupled with soil moisture monitoring has resulted in both increased crop yields as well as more even crops, even in this tricky dry year that we’ve had.

At Greenvale Pastures this season Craige Mackenzie has seen a massive advantage in his investment in spray irrigation (1 pivot and 1 lateral) both with VRI and his soil moisture probes. Average wheat yields have been up approximately 3.5t/ha this season and ryegrass yields have been up approximately 800kg/ha. These quite large yield increases during a testing dry year show that good yields are highly achievable and in Craige’s case, that Precision Agriculture (PA) and the tools and technologies that are part of PA are helping him achieve this.

Wheat yield map - 2015/16 season

Assuming that 50ha of a farm was in ryegrass and 50ha was in wheat with these yield increases it would give an increased profit of $64,750 (assuming wheat is $370/t) for wheat and $100,000 (assuming ryegrass is $2.50/kg) for ryegrass. This averages an increased profit of $1,647.50/hectare. When put into perspective this increase in yield is enough to almost pay for a pivot a VRI system and EM Surveying in one year.

The other advantage of using VRI on cropping farms is that you typically get a more even crop which makes life far easier when it comes to harvest as the entire crop is mature and ready for harvest at once. This advantage is very hard to tie an actual cost/benefit value to however the feedback from cropping farmers to date is that this is worth a significant value to their enterprises and this differs from crop to crop.

Wheat (Starfire) on 7th January 2016 - Paddock 19 @ Greenvale Pastures

The challenge from here is to see how we can consistently keep these yields up for all crops and across all seasons while maintaining strong on farm profitability. From where we’re placed and with the experiences we’re having across a wide range of farms we see Precision Agriculture as the way to do this. It’s all about knowing your paddocks and your crops and mitigating the weakest limiting factor and working from there. For some it might be fertility, for others it might be variable soil types and irrigation but for all cropping farmers yield mapping should play a key part in this Precision Ag journey.    

Here’s a photo for a bit of yield motivation…what can you achieve in this coming season? 

Great yields in wheat - 2015/16 season @ Greenvale Pastures

You can also see more of what’s happening on farm at Greenvale and keep up with their progress on their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Greenvale-Pastures-Ltd-135453169954919/

If you have any questions on how you can get the most out of your yield data or where to start the Precision Ag journey please give us a call at Agri Optics (03 3029227) so we can help you get started in the most efficient way for your farm. Cheers, Jemma