TECH USE IN CROP PRODUCTION

TECH USE IN CROP PRODUCTION

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
At a recent meeting between farmers and their bankers there was great dialogue between the conference participants. I listened to grain farmer STEVE PITSTICK wax poetic on a number of agricultural topics involving critical decisions. Everybody wants to be the grand slam hitter, to be the big hero, but a whole bunch of base hits are better. In farming, it's much easier to look for a whole bunch of 1 percent improvements. They're just easier to find. If you look, you can find them. 10 percent gain is just hard to come by. Just doesn't happen very often. So moving the focus is probably the best way. We've got one chance a year to plant that seed and do it right. So by having information on the planter,telling us all the metrics of what's going on, placement, seed spacing, depth, soil moisture, downforce, making sure that we've got that seed planted in the best environment. That was big. Looking at some of the data, we found that we had fields that were 6 to 9 percent, not planted at the intended depth. Once we started looking at the data, made improvements to the planner that got that half a percent. So yeah, that's 4 or 5 percent. It's a one year gain, but it's stuff that we didn't know before data. One of the biggest reasons for this too, is that we get bigger machines and we're going faster. I can't make all the changes that I need to as fast as I need to. And if we can let the machine learn and do that on its own we’re miles ahead and getting the perfect crop sample.
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