Hi I'm Brian Luck assistant professor and extension specialist in the
Biological Systems Engineering department at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Today I'm going to talk to you about precision AG
technologies, and the fact that we need to use what we already have when
producing grain in low-margin years. So investment in new technologies is
probably not the best thing to do when profit margins are tight. There's a steep
learning curve. You can develop quite a bit of frustration working with these
technologies, and it can be sort of a time sake when field operations are
pending, not to mention the cost of the technology itself. What we can do though
is use and access existing technology to our advantage. So the first thing I'll
tell you about is is your smartphone, the device you carry in your pocket. There's
a lot of neat things on there that can be used to accomplish some precision AG
tasks. First off you can utilize the GPS receiver on your
smartphone for several typical AG application. So the accuracy on the GPS
receiver's not the greatest, it's plus or minus 10 to 15 feet, but if we're looking at
soil sampling or field scouting or record-keeping of that sort, we can do a
lot of that stuff, so mapping field boundaries, marking areas of interest, or
even grid and zone soil sample. Most of these applications are free. They usually
require an online account for accessing the data and sometimes some more
features can be obtained by a small fee. I listed some examples here
not endorsing any of these, just a few that are out there: Connected Farm Scout
from Tremble, Sirrus has the SST software, and then the AG DNA app as well. One of
the first things we can do with this since we all have perfectly square
fields, but we don't really have any trouble mapping field boundaries, which
is not the case obviously, but using your smartphone to map a field boundary is
not the worst thing in the world. You can identify areas such as buffer strips and
grass waterways that don't need any application during the growing
season, and we want to maintain those areas to minimize environmental impact
due to production. So looking at some of the other technologies that are out
there, looking at pest and nutrient application, pesticide nutrient application,
excuse me. You know you may not have this technology, but you may be able to access
it due to a co-op doing custom application or things along those lines.
One thing I'll bring to your attention is using automatic section control on
your spray boom. So just looking at point rows, end rows, and grass waterways and
buffer strips that we do not want to spray, looking at an 80-foot boom which
is really fairly small now compared to some of the booms we have in the state. You
know if you just shut the whole boom section entire boom off as you enter a
point row, you overspray about 720 square feet. Dividing that into sections,
if you look above five sections or above that seven sections, you decrease the
amount of overspray pretty substantially. So being able to use those saves on
chemicals and reduces application error, obviously. Again the other thing is
maintaining our environmental structures, buffer strips, grassy waterways, things on
those lines. When the nozzles shut off you don't eliminate those areas, and we
minimize our environmental impact, and also maintain reduced soil runoff. So
another thing with automatic section control that I've been talking about for
a little while is that our applications vary due to turning and variations in
boom pressure. So 25 to 36 percent of these fields receive the
prescribed application right. So something to think about when using that
automatic section control is to minimize turning and make as many straight
parallel passes as possible, and then it does speak to the benefits of
variable rate application just for maintaining a constant application rate.
The goal of that obviously would be to minimize chemical usage to essentially
save you money on that end. Another thing we'll talk about that you may have
access to is the dry nutrient application with the spinner spreader
which has on/off capabilities and variable rate control as well. The variable
rate's important due to the fact that some areas of field ubay find doesn't
need the chemical or the fertilizer application whereas the on/off
capabilities minimizes over application in headlands employment rose so I have a
quick example that I've taught people through which is we worked with a field
and Dunn County it's 120 acre field and we had one acre grid soil sampling on
that field this was going to do for a lime application so we wanted to put on
the proper amount of lime initially we didn't get the variable rate application
map done in time so in the spring two tons per acre were applied that cost at
the time twenty-six dollars per ton so the total cost for that was six thousand
two hundred forty dollars soil sampling on the one acre grid show variation from
0 to 15 ton per acre I know we're not going to put on 15 ton per acre so we
assume about a 6-ton max or in this case we actually went to a 55 ton maximum
application so everything got to Tom's breaker and then we're going to aim for
the middle and apply three tons additional application that's going to
be a maximum let's assume that we applied that to the entire field it
would cost an additional nine thousand three hundred sixty dollars it's quite a
bit if we look at the variable rate it came out to be an average rate of one
point five seven tons per acre over that field some areas getting three times
breaker others receiving zero so we applied 188 point 33 tons costing four
thousand eight ninety-seven dollars that was a
difference before thousand 463 so we actually saved that amount of money by
not applying the three tons break or uniformly cost across the field when we
go back to soil sampling for pH again and this year next we should show less
variation in soil pH as well which would be a good thing and mean Lex will need
to be applied in the future so another example of using technology is is one
where if you do have a corn planter with Roe shut off then you can utilize that
to save on feed so we have a theoretical 12 real corn planter on 30 inch row
spacing and we have a perfectly square one acre field takes about seven classes
seven passes to get over that with the planner so we plan on the first row in
and grow every time assuming that we go in 30 inches on a square headland turn
how much do we / plant if you look at it it's about 1044 square feet / plant and
that's 10 t 4 acres again a perfectly square field and I know we all have
those so when you multiply that over a hundred acres say of perfectly square
field we / plant two point four acres and that's starting to mean something
now right so what I've done here is calculated essentially the amount of
feed wasted which is about two point four percent and then if we assume two
hundred thirty dollars a bag around the Brady feed which may or may not be
accurate you've been looking at about 5050 two cents per acre that we've
wasted essentially in feed alone now that's not necessary that all are doing
is calculating the price of seed that we over planted what happens when we double
the yield or I'm sorry double the plant population what happens to the yield and
those in groves anybody will tell you if you double plants operate population
same amount of nutrients field is going to go down so we're actually losing
yield on that end as well so utilizing row shut off in a planter will actually
save you money on seed as well as yield in this
into the end of the year finally I want to talk about auto steering guidance a
lot of machines have this on it now and if you use it you can save a little bit
of money so utilizing auto steer navigation could provide net returns up
to three dollars and thirty-five cents per acre according to Shockley in 2011
what this does is it reduces overlap and skipped areas in the field saves on
input input costs and minimizes the impact crop yield it also maintains past
to pass widths which minimizes field operation passes and that saves fuel one
study i saw actually said the over an 80 acre field they did it with auto steer
and then they tilled it again with just human operator and they were five passes
difference between the two so the auto automatic guidance save five passes over
the field which is quite a bit of fuel the other thing to think about is
operator fatigue is reduced when you use auto steer so once you trust the auto
sphere system the working you can work a little longer to hit the operation
windows so you're not as tired and you can also pay more attention to the
implement rather than steering the machine which you're going to minimize
the effect of clocks eat tubes or anything that's going wrong back there
on the implement doing the operation to the field of the crop so with that I'll
in my video and there's my contact information feel free to contact me
and