It has been a long time since I have lasted posted, life has been busy, but I am going to give it a go again. My goal is to post weekly, we will see how that goes.
2015 started out early for us in west central Minnesota, not quite as early as 2012, and definitely not as warm as 2012. Wheat and corn got planted in a timely manner, as well as most soybeans. There were some late planted soybeans stretching into the first week of June or so.
As I have been spraying corn I have been noticing that there is not very many fields that are real even. Emergence was uneven due to cool temps and wet weather. Small grains were looking good until this morning, most fields have areas of grain that went down during last nights rain, there was no wind, just a gentle rain. Soybeans are looking good.
What has been happening in precision ag around here you may be wondering? We have gotten most of our variable rate spreading done for the year. Most of our variable rate fertilizer goes on in the spring, we do some VR topdressing, but due to limitations in minimum amounts of pounds our machine can do, we mainly do flat rate topdressing, we take care of the variation in the spring applied fertilizer.
Variable rate planting keeps growing each year. We have seen more ground around here being planted variable rate than ever before. We have rolling hills around here with pockets of gravel/sand, so dropping our seeding rates in these areas seems to be working well. Last year, in these lighter soil areas, we dropped our corn seeding rates by up to 30%. These areas responded well with some yielding higher than they ever have in these spots. This year we dropped a few of the lightest soils 40% lower in population compared to the field average. We did this because from what we did last year, it seemed like we could go lower in the sandiest areas of our fields. The field that I was most excited to do this on didn't work out for this year. The grower planting that field was having monitor problems and could not get the variable rate maps to work, so it was planted flat rate. After rigging up a temporary "new" wiring harness, the rest of his variable rate maps worked well.
I have been working with our Winfield R7 Tool representative, as well as our Winfield Master Agronomy Advisor on some pilot programs dealing with crop health monitoring above and below ground. While we are just getting into this, this program looks to be quite interesting. It monitors the field selected and compares it to other fields planted to the same crop around the same planted date. We can look at how the field is doing as far as crop health and which way the field is trending compared to previous readings as well as similar fields in the area. That is the above ground part. The below ground part is more of a multiple year program that looks at what was applied and when and soil & tissue samples and compares that to yield. We will be learning much more about that as the year and years go on. It is interesting and though provoking what all of this information has to tell us!
Every where you look now there is a company that has some new or different precision ag offering. Some are getting to be industry standard, and some are cutting edge. What we do know is that as fast as technology develops, the prices of the latest and greatest usually come down fairly quickly, and while I am not saying you need to try every new thing that comes along, I do encourage to research them, get to know what they do, and if you feel that it has a fit on your farm or business, try it out. Someone else probably is thinking of doing it, or already has started. One place that I like to visit online is www.newagtalk.com. It is an online community of farmers, retailers, small business and anyone interested in precision ag. There are many areas of interest , and you can read posts and ask questions and you will usually always get an answer of what worked or didn't work for someone else.I am looking forward to keeping up to date on my blog. Please feel free to let me know what you think, or if you have ideas for topics, let me know in the comments section. Hope to see you back soon!
Jason
