Predictive Ag

Predictive Ag

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
So the biggest topic over the last 4 months has been the whole coronavirus pandemic, infected number of people…deaths, most highly impacted areas in the world and in our nation. Medical interventions are top of mind and prescriptions for disease treatment. But let’s change the subject for a minute.

Symptoms, diagnostics and prescriptions can also relate to agriculture.

The increasing use of precision agriculture is leading to more prescriptive methods to address specific issues within a particular field or crop. Land O'Lakes Teddy Bekele at this year's USDA AG Outlook Forum says innovation is making this happen through methods such as satellite imagery, data collection of seed and soil types, and crop and field production and resource trends and plant tissue samples gathered into a QR coated bag and scanned via mobile device for analysis.

You scan the bag and it geospatialy locates where that sample was taken and then it goes to a lab and within 48 hours, preferably 24 hours, you get the macro and micronutrients composition of that leaf. And when we know that now we can start to say what type of application could we make on this field?

Bekele adds, combining data in a predictive model that provides the producers some insight... Where that yield might end up directionally, but also a kind of nitrogen, potassium or water changes do you need to make on that field as the crops coming out of the ground?

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