Farmer's Weekly (South Africa)
The precision agriculture benchmark: are we there yet?
The precision agriculture approach was introduced many years ago. Today, as it becomes even more widely used, it is important to measure the adoption of this method of farming supported by technology and assist producers in strategising and defining new goals. writes.
Just as we know that no two pieces of land are the same, so too do we know that every person is unique and, therefore, not all producers have the type of personality that goes hand in hand with precision farming practices. Luckily, this does not mean that only perfectionists can be precision farmers, or that you cannot be successful if you lack this trait.
You either are, or you know of, the farmer I am about to describe. He or she has years of experience and can simply go into a field, touch the ground and look at the sky, and know exactly when the conditions will be perfect for planting.
Today, a world exists in which every farmer can be this farmer, and where all machine operators can be as good as or even better than the most experienced operator out there.
AN OPTIMISATION MINDSET
Technology is there to support your precision farming practices, so years of experience can be circumvented to an extent. What I often hear is that farmers are anxiously asking what they need to do to future-proof their farms.
I am a staunch believer in precision agriculture and the technology that supports these practices. And yes, I once included the phrase ‘adopt or die’ in a presentation, which I am not proud of. I also know that when it rains just enough and your grain happens to be in high demand, you will have record earnings that season. However, when the opposite occurs, well, there isn’t much you can do about it, and precision agriculture practices cannot make it rain or change the grain price. What it can do, however, is ease the pain during the lows and increase the rewards you reap during the highs.
The effect that precision agriculture and the accompanying technology has is measurable, and indirectly fosters a mindset of optimisation on the farm, which contributes to its overall sustainability.
GETTING THE BEST FROM YOUR SOILS
For me, the biggest eye-opener regarding precision agriculture was the variability of soil on a 1ha vineyard and how that had to be managed to get the most out of the crop. With a wine farm, the harvest is affected the most, as grapes from different soil zones must be separated, and the individual batches used in specific processes to produce the various wines.
In grain farming, a lot of the same happens, where a field will show differences in maize yield potential ranging from 3t/ha to 11t/ha.
This example field was farmed with a fixed recipe that aimed for 7t/ha. This means that the zones with a potential for 3t/ha would give you just that, if you’re lucky, and the nutrients and increased seed population would go to waste. On the other hand, the 11t/ha zone wouldn’t receive the resources to achieve its full potential, and would theoretically only reach 7t/ha.
The results show that with variablerate precision application, the input costs were similar, but because site-specific farming was employed on the field, a R2 000/ha increase on income was realised. However, this isn’t the case for all fields, and it could be higher or lower.
PRECISION AGRICULTURE JOURNEY
A farmer’s precision agriculture journey can be explained in terms of tiers 0 to 5, as developed by the PrecisionAg Institute, where each tier relates to the adoption of the practice. A producer can use it as a benchmark for his or her operation, but it is not a perfect system, and not necessarily the be-all and end-all of successful farming. You might already be applying some of this already, albeit without the support of technology to refine and improve the practice even further.
Tier 0: The initial step into the word of precision agriculture with technology involves basic GPS-guided steering and section control on a sprayer. This brings forth operational efficiency, and it is easy to determine payback on your investment because it is so well documented. Limited data is collected in this tier, but what is collected is not used for the planning of the coming seasons.
Tier 1: Data collection starts to become relevant, and at least one layer of data is gathered. The data is geo-referenced, which means that one can see a heat map linked to the GPS location in the field, and it is shown as individual management zones. Satellite imagery is also collected, but not used fully in decision-making.
Tier 2: Here, the collection of data is advanced and expanded to multiple layers. It now becomes important to be able to make operational decisions based on these data layers. An external agronomic service provider now aggregates the data to ensure the relevant output is produced. The layers collected here are mostly seasonal imagery, yield data, seed cultivar information, and weather data. GPS resolution also improves to less than 10cm.
Tier 3: At this level, your data really starts to work for you. This is an evidencebased approach and everything that is applied is recorded as planted, as sprayed, as fertilised, and as scouted. Additional data layers are then created to further improve decision-making.
The severity of a loss-of-data event is detrimental to the farming operation, and explains the value attached to the decision-making power the data holds.
Tier 4: By this stage, a farmer has been operating on Tier 3 for a few years, and has collected multiple historical data layers. It is now possible to benchmark the seasons and determine the medium-term effect of trials on the farm in different climatic conditions.
Having the historical information at hand enables the farmer to make evidence-based, in-season, on-the-go operational decisions.
Tier 5: This is a continuation of Tier 4, and as confidence in the data builds, so too does the decision-making power and its effectiveness. It is here that the exploration of technology and solutions that further improve the effectiveness of the data is important.
ELEMENTS FOR SUCCESS
To measure is to know, and by recording those measurements, means that a farmer can reference them year after year and improve on them.
Manual input is detrimental to the process, and even more so when you do not use the same system every day. It can be daunting to set up software for the season if a lot of manual adjustment is required and you forget how it is done because you do not use it often enough.
Every farm is different, and a personalised solution that is truly applicable to your operation is more sustainable; however, not all companies offer customisable solutions. As far as possible, you need to minimise data duplication and have everything in one place or data platform. Finally, having a trusted partner on service and support will make your journey successful. Without the good support, it’s not easy to advance through the tiers to get to a point where your operation can be managed on evidencebased data on an ongoing, in-season basis. Stehan Cloete, a mechanical engineer, is the director of AgTech Africa. Email him at stehan@agtech-africa.com. Subject line: Equipment.
EXPERIENCE ISN’T ALWAYS NECESSARY IF YOUR PRECISION AGRICULTURE IS SUPPORTED BY TECHNOLOGY