Better Farming – September 2016

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26 Farm News First > Better Farming September 2016
“We figured it was the Holy Grail,”
said Steve Redmond, Hensall Dis-
trict Co-op precision ag special-
ist. The occasion was the arrival of
the first yield monitor he had seen. It
was his first real exposure to the
possibilities of precision agriculture.
Twenty-eight years later, Red-
mond’s precision ag management
team still sees unlimited potential for
data collection and analysis to hone
chemical application, automatic
irrigation programs, hybrid selection
and more. Yet, his team is still doing
“mostly basic things, variable seeding
and variable fertilizer applications,”
Redmond says.
So much more is possible.
When it comes to how they
approach and apply data collection,
farmers occupy different camps, says
Leo Bose, advanced farming systems
marketing manager at Case IH in
Milwaukee. “Some are 110 per cent
on board and use data daily. Then
there’s a subset that uses some sort of
harvest data, maybe looking at it year
over year. Some aren’t using the data
to advantage at all.”
The data is being collected. A
modern combine yield monitor
collects information about grain mass
and moisture content and uploads it
to a global positioning system. The
farmer in turn uses the system to
create a yield map that identifies how
areas in a field produced. This yield
map is the basic tool of precision
agriculture.
Using a GPS satellite, a local base
station and sensors on the harvester
to constantly calculate the harvester’s
position, a map can be generated that
is accurate to a centimetre.
“In precision agriculture, we are
just scratching the surface,” says
Redmond. “The technology is going
to keep getting better. I saw a quad
copter (drone) recently with 11
cameras taking images at different
wavelengths. When that information
was processed, we could see the tire
marks of the cultivator. Keep in mind,
this is when the corn was chest high.”
Bose also speaks about the level of
detail and accuracy that can be
achieved with the new technological
Nurturing precision in the field
Information collected by today’s field equipment can help make your next season’s crops
an even bigger success. Explore the highlights and issues of data collection in this followup to
Better Farming’s January 2015 exploration of precision technology on the farm.
by JEFF CULP
Steve Redmond
Leo Bose
PRECISIONAG