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The Precision Farming Primer
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When Adam and Eve first picked up a hoe in the
Garden of Eden, they practiced site-specific agriculture—planting seeds, nurturing the plants and harvesting the yields. With
an innate desire to know and to do, mankind has progressed past placing a dead
fish in every hill of corn, beans and squash. Now when farmers or ranchers
reach into a toolbox, they find bits and bytes and satellite parts along with
sockets sets and drill bits. Computers connect combines and crop input
applicators to databases driven by the geo-referenced data processed through geographic information systems (GIS) applications.
Tracing the effect of site-specific farm
management requires a look at where the industry has been, where it is and where
it’s headed. Harnessing the technologies that make precision farming possible promises to empower farmers to meet the
economic and ecological objectives of their farm businesses.
Many modern agricultural producers have spent
their careers carefully managing family farms that go back generations. At the
heart of precision
farming lies site-specific
management, which involves the ability to collect and control information to
accurately and appropriately address parts of fields for actual needs, rather
than whole fields for average needs. Site-specific managers can use information technologies (IT) to turn their data into decisions.
Such farmers follow a precise process,
acquiring raw data, analyzing derived information, adding related knowledge and
applying the results with wisdom. They depend on precise devices to deliver
precise data to determine precise advice. This requires them to inventory
practical variability within their fields, investigate probable causes,
instigate possible solutions to address management opportunities on a
site-specific basis and evaluate the whole process. Farmers finally have tools
for real-time, on-farm research. As a result, they have the potential to produce
food and fiber more efficiently.
Precision farming allows today’s agricultural
producers, advisors and researchers to integrate IT with numerous field and
office activities. Such tools include GIS, the global positioning system (GPS), remote sensing, on-the-go sensors, monitors and controllers. For example, it’s possible today to meter out
multiple crop-protection products to specific sites through irrigation systems
and applicators with on-the-go sensors as well as track yield and crop quality
with growth-simulation software, sensors and remote imaging. Data collected
remotely or on-site can be sent via new telecommunication capabilities for near
real-time analysis. As a result, farmers now have new tools to predict
the outcome of site-specific management¾ weather permitting.
But how many farmers actually use these new
technologies?
- There
are about 300 million cropland acres in the United States and less than 2
million "farmers."
- Yield monitoring appears to be the most extensive site-specific
farming technology. A recent @gInnovator survey of about 20 yield
monitor manufacturers estimates 17,000 on-the-go units were used for
harvesting North American crops in 1997.
- That figure is up from 10,000 in 1996, 4,400 in 1995, 1,200 in 1994, 300 in 1993 and about 50 in 1992.
- Worldwide, there are perhaps 20,000 on-the-go yield monitors. That’s about 3 percent of the world’s combines.
- About half have GPS capabilities, so the data collected can be turned into maps—a growing trend.
- If you figure 1,500 acres per monitor (as some manufacturers suggest), or perhaps 25.5 million acres, this would be about 8 percent of North America’s major grains/oilseeds acreage.
- At about $4,000 per monitor and around $3,000 per GPS unit, about $100 million may be invested in yield monitoring hardware alone.
- Currently, the acreage under site-specific or variable-rate input application likely runs less than half the yield monitoring figure.
- The
1997 Precision Agriculture Dealership Survey, conducted by Farm
Chemicals magazine and Purdue University, indicates one-third of the
U.S. agrochemical dealers sampled in the nationwide survey offer soil
sampling with GPS, and more than 40 percent perform field mapping.
- Approximately 25 percent provide yield mapping analysis, 15 percent handle yield monitor sales and support, 19 percent offer agronomic interpretation of GPS data, 80 percent sell seed and 51 percent sell enhanced seed.
- Almost 5 percent can perform variable rate seeding, 84 percent offer custom application services and 50 percent provide variable rate application.
- Such figures lead one to project an increase in site-specific services.
Behind every technology is a philosophy. Most
farmers adopt site-specific technologies the following reasons:
- to
discover ways to cut their costs,
- to
use inputs appropriate to the productive capacity of the site, and
- to
optimize their outputs for a safe and stable supply of food and fiber.
Future farmers will be plugged into the
planet as never before. They’ll use conduits of digital information, piping
data to and from their farm fields. They’ll connect with channels of electronic
communication, as they forge new links in the farm-to-food chain. And they’ll
work in new ways with new communities of suppliers and customers.
They’re not just "farming by the
numbers," but they are able to apply more science to the art of farming.
They don’t want to become entrapped by data-driven technologies; they expect to
be empowered with decision-support tools.
Farmers are more like artists than
accountants. Sure, they watch the bottom line. But producing a crop puts all
their knowledge and wisdom on the line every year, meeting head-on the risks of
products, prices and precipitation. Some precision farmers look for future
prescriptions of precisely what to do when. Others expect the development of
site-specific "recipes" to work for more farmers, giving them more
latitude to put their gray cells in charge of the black boxes running their
farms—art with science.
Weather remains the number one variable
farmers deal with every day. They can’t control that variable, but they can
seek to understand how to plan and manage variability as a fact of business. As
a result, farmers are the front-line integrators of information and technology.
They’re turning IT and GIS into geographic management systems as part of a toolbox of overall farm management tools
and techniques aimed at reducing risk and optimizing efficiency.
This becomes even more important when you
consider the future structure of agriculture. The industry is moving toward
consolidation and vertical integration, along with the adoption of IT and biotechnology. As a result, there may be fewer farmers. This
suggests forward-thinking producers must forge new links on the farm-to-food
chain.
"What you know about what you can
grow" will become the key to farm management. The agriculture industry
will become increasingly involved in planting, growing, harvesting and
processing "information" along with value-added crops.
Site-specific management drives farmers to accurate record keeping, which will direct their precision farming decision making. This must be the next transition: from precision farming to appropriate agriculture¾ doing the right thing at the right time in the right place in the right way. Today, the payoff appears to be in the process, rather than in off-the-shelf precision farming products. The economics of the practices are site-specific. What farmers need is "precise advice," which will be determined through more research by farmers, suppliers and universities. At the heart of it all will remain temporal and spatial decision making—made more effective by GIS working in tandem with other spatial information technologies.
Grant Mangold
Linn Grove, Iowa
February, 1999