UNDERSTANDING PRECISION AGRICULTURE
Growers might know from experience that they have areas in their fields that consistently deliver high yields season after season — and other parts that just aren’t very productive at all.
But is having that knowledge enough for growers to optimize inputs and yield potential in each area of a field so that their overall profitability is higher and their environmental impact is lower?
This, say researchers from the Precision Agriculture Advancement for Ontario (PAAO) project team, is where creating management zones can help.
Management zones are areas within a field that have similar yield potential. However, this similar performance can be due to a variety of different reasons, including soil type, elevation and weather conditions within or between years.
Ian McDonald, Applied Research Coordinator with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA), says that management zones form the backbone of a precision agriculture site specific management approach to production, and serve as the foundation for optimizing profitability through other tools, such as prescription maps to tailor crop inputs.
The PAAO team is trying to better understand how growers should go about creating management zones, which types of data they need to collect, and how it should all fit together.
Nicole Rabe, OMAFRA Land Resource Specialist, explains that creating a management zone is based on three main buckets: what growers see, what they can measure and what they achieved in terms of high, average, or low crop yields. All this information is then taken together and mapped out to produce a management zone.
The first thing growers may already be doing is collecting both yield and elevation data off of equipment.
However, crunching the yield and elevation numbers and then performing the integrated analysis of the different layers to create a management zone can be complicated.
Another problem is that the approaches aren’t transparent and don’t give growers a sense of what type of math or process is being used to analyze and integrate each data layer.
The PAAO team has also found that the same data layers aren’t always used to perform an integrated analysis of a field, as some layers may be more important than others depending on a given year’s weather and agronomic conditions.
For full article and more information, visit fieldcropNews.com/2017/01/understanding-precision-agriculture-where-do-management-zones-make-sense/.
