Digital tools help farmers increase production, make decisions

CHICAGO — Digital agriculture is the next wave of technology that will help farmers increase their production and improve their management decisions.

“In the past, we’ve been able to increase production by farming more land or using more fertilizer,” said Bruce Erickson, clinical professor of digital agriculture at Purdue University.

“In the future, we’ll increase production by doing a better job of things,” said Erickson during a presentation at the Midwest Agriculture Conference, The Changing Landscape for Agricultural Inputs, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

“We will do that by using sensors, monitoring things and analyzing the data to be more precise and intelligent in the things we’re doing,” he said.

Technology adoption does not happen in a vacuum.

“When someone does something, there is an effect that happens,” Erickson said. “For wheat, soybeans and corn, as technology increases yields, that can reduce costs which we know affects the market.”

When hybrid corn was introduced, a farmer who did not grow it was at a competitive disadvantage compared to other farmers.

“It is the same with digital technology,” Erickson said.

“One of our greatest worries is big grain and oilseed farmers around the world are adopting a lot of this technology, but little farmers and oftentimes disadvantaged farmers are not,” the university professor said.

“On large grain and oilseed farms, there is a lot of GPS guidance and section controllers and quite a bit of precision soil sampling,” he said. “But that is not always continuing onto variable rate technology, which is really interesting.”

In addition, farmers are using quite a bit of yield monitoring, Erickson said, but they aren’t using those yield maps very much to make decisions.

“We need to be doing that more on our farms,” he said.

The ability to do remote sensing has been available since the 1960s.

“That’s when the satellites went up for aerial imagery,” the professor said. “Lately, we’ve had the use of drones for imagery, but we’re not doing very much so we need to find uses for that.”

Also, Erickson said, variable rate technology has not been adopted as quickly by farmers as guidance systems.

“After two decades of having the ability to use variable rate technology, most farmers in the U.S. are still putting the same amount of seed, fertilizers and pesticides on every acre,” he said.

Most precision farming has been about saving costs rather than increasing yields.

“With guidance systems, you’re saving fuel and time,” Erickson said. “And with section controllers on sprayers, you’re not over spraying into end rows, so that’s where the efficiency comes in.

“Where we seem to be stuck in digital agriculture is the area of understanding variation in fields to characterize it and then analyze it to decide what to do.”

“We’ve been struggling on how to put together the story of fields to understand the cause and effect,” he said.

Farmers might have some opportunity to use variable rate applications of fertilizers.

“If you look at the amount of phosphorus, potassium and lime we put on fields, there are some opportunities in fields where soil tests are higher where we could cut back some,” Erickson said.

“Where the soil tests are lower, we could put on a little bit more,” he said. “In general, we’re going to need to continue to put on the basic amounts of those fertilizers.”

However, Erickson said, there are some companies that are working on how to unlock nutrients in soil.

“If you look at the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in the soil, there is way more available to the plants that they can’t access,” he said.

For example, there is around 800 pounds of phosphorus per acre.

“But in the soil solution where the plants get it from, the concentrations are very low,” the professor said. “But there haven’t been revolutionary things happening in this area.”

Probably the best opportunity for variable rate applications is with pesticides, Erickson said.

“There seems to be areas where we are putting pesticides on fields that maybe don’t need pesticides,” he said. “An automated practice like see and spray is probably one of the best things we can do.”

For more than two decades, Purdue has been surveying ag retailers about their adoption of precision farming technologies.

“About 11% said they are doing see and spray currently and 25% of them are planning to do that in three years,” Erickson said. “For supplying crop inputs with a drone, about one-third are currently doing that and half of them said they would be doing that in three years.”

A company in Indiana is working on developing a robotic ground sprayer, the professor said.

“The robot can go 24 hours a day and you don’t need a person on it, so that is a way they could potentially cut costs,” he said.

The survey asked the retailers about their costs to apply products by a drone.

“In general, they are using about two people per crew and they typically have two drones per crew,” Erickson said. “And they’re spending about $62,000 on average to set up one of these crews.”

Another question on the survey asked retailers how artificial intelligence will affect their business.

“In general, they think it will improve the accuracy of their work, but they don’t think it’s going to save them any labor, which is interesting,” Erickson said.

“In terms of the dealers and their enterprise, their biggest issue is they can’t find employees to do precision farming types of work,” he said.