High-tech fattens the bottom line

Agricultural Research, April, 1996 by J. Kim Kaplan, Dennis Senft, Don Comis, Jill Lee

Badger is not a high school kid playing Ag Kombat at an arcade. As farm manager at the ARS Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Maryland, he oversees more than 2,000 acres planted in soybeans, alfalfa, and corn.

What Badger was doing was test driving a computer-controlled AgChem Terra Gator to apply potash at varying rates throughout a small field. The Terra Gator was adjusting application rates in response to a map of soil potassium levels generated previously by another computer.

"I was looking at a revolution," Badger says. "No guesswork, no single rate per field. To do this type of variable application by hand would have been right off the economic scale, if it could be done at all."

This is not farming in yesteryear's style. Silicon Valley has come to farming in a big way - sort of the rural lane of the information super-highway. For those farmers and ranchers who are taking the digital on-ramp, computers are changing the way almost any phase of their operation is managed.

Hardware and software are available for everything from controlling the flow of irrigation water to pin-pointing application of fertilizer - from record keeping to manure management.

"Over the past few years, we've developed many ways for farmers to have larger and larger amounts of data about all aspects of farming. Now, what the computer programs and computer-driven equipment are doing is giving farmers a way to reduce those data to manageable decisionmaking and then execute those decisions efficiently," explains Galen Hart, who is with the ARS Remote Sensing and Modeling Laboratory at BARC.

Hart helps facilitate ARS research in one of the hottest areas of agricultural computerization, precision farming - what Badger was trying out. Precision farming is a method that links information about growing conditions to sophisticated, computer-run farm equipment, allowing farmers to treat areas within a single field differently.

At the heart of precision agriculture is detailed information about how conditions vary across a field. Soil samples exactly located by Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites are analyzed for fertility and other characteristics. This information is then put together on computer- generated maps.

A computer screen in the cab of the tractor indicates the tractor's position in the field by the same GPS coordinates as the soil samples, so the variations in application are automatically linked to the variations in soil conditions shown on the map, usually displayed as color gradations.

"With precision farming, you get automatic customizing," Hart says. "The size of the area that can receive individualized treatment has gone from a few acres with conventional farming, to a few square feet."

But there is not necessarily a reduction in the total amount of inputs in a field from using precision farming methods.

What does happen is that the farmer can apply inputs as efficiently as possible - for example, putting the most nitrogen where the soil has the least organic material. Or realizing when the maximum possible yield on a poor spot in a field has been reached and not wasting extra nitrogen that just can't be used.

"That efficiency translates to the bottom line - getting maximum return from a field with the least possible inputs," Hart says. "For the farmer, computer support can mean making more economically sensible management decisions."

And there are environmental benefits. "When a farmer isn't wasting nitrogen, there is also less likelihood of nitrogen running off or leaching into ground water," Hart says.

Monitoring the Payoff

At the other end of precision farming is the yield monitor. With software connected to GPS, these monitors are attached to combines, where they measure weight and moisture level as a crop is harvested. Farmers get exact, accurate readings every 3 seconds for the amount harvested in a strip 2 yards long by the width of the combine. An 80-acre field of corn can generate about 77 pages of data.

That is one of the problems of computers: They can generate enough data to drown a mathematician, let alone a farmer. One way to make the data more user-friendly has been to translate the data into the same type of color-related maps.

Some of the monitors also allow the combine operator to mark places in the data as they pass through an area. The operator chooses the categories such as wet spot, weeds, insect damage, or disease - generating even more data. But these are numbers that allow the farmer to figure out what is happening.

"The yield monitor means I can relate exactly what I see in my fields to how it affected yield in that spot. I see the failure or success of management decisions in hard numbers," says Douglas Harford, who farms 1,500 acres of soybeans and corn near Mazon, Illinois, about 60 miles south of Chicago.

This ability of computers to precisely measure the success of decisions also puts the farmer's advisers more on the spot, Harford points out. Whether it is a paid consultant, an extension agent, or a research scientist, "I can validate their advice at the end of the season with real accuracy. I can validate everything I'm told with hard numbers," Harford says.