The Sense in Real Time Sensing

Author: SPAA

While many Australian broadacre croppers have embraced autosteer as the entry point into precision agriculture (PA), UK farmers have focused their PA investments into variable rate technologies. Consequently, much can be learnt from the UK about the possibilities and pitfalls of adopting variable rate. At the SPAA Expo, UK farmer and PA consultant Clive Blacker of Precision Decisions shared his experience and knowledge of prescription mapping, real time sensing and new developments in the European PA market. Farming in Yorkshire with his brother, Clive Blacker adopted PA eight years ago with the main aim of reducing input costs. With highly variable soils across small areas (average paddock size eight hectares), he rapidly came to the conclusion that uniform applications could not satisfy the in-paddock variability. In order to manage his crops more effectively he investigated different methods of in-paddock mapping. “Soil moisture is not generally a limiting factor for us, so, a yield map is really a historic picture of where seasonal factors such as combinations of moisture and temperature impacted on crop nutrition, disease and ultimately grain yield.” Download the full article to read more.

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