Precision Agriculture

 The costs associated with inputs including seed, fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and time/labor have sky-rocketed in recent years and in many ways an ag producer’s future depends on watching these expenditures and investing wisely. Investing in what…is the question. Technology is the answer coming from Curt Pengelly, Precision Ag Manager for the J.R. Simplot Company in the Lower Snake River Basin. “It seemed to us as we looked at soil values across the State of Idaho that they varied to a high degree within individual fields. We recognized there was technology out there that was available to allow us to do site specific placement of products throughout the field. We saw it as a way of making better agronomic and economic decisions about a field. There are two technologies that drove this whole thing forward. Public use of the GPS system which allows us to record specific locations in the field as well as navigate back to those locations. The second was the adoption of geographic information systems. This allows us to record those positions on a computer, manage the data in a visual format rather than a tabular format. It’s like taking your fertilizer or chemical budget to a financial analyst.”