News

With commodity prices continuing to be relatively weak every opportunity to increase the efficiency of use of inputs should be addressed. One such opportunity was the theme of last weeks HGCA R & D conference Precision Agriculture.

Many aspects of this approach were presented and the same questions raised which were fundamentally around what is the return on the investment that can be expected. This is always a difficult sum as every farm will be slightly different e.g. with regards to variable rate fertilizer, the return will depend on the inherent variability of the soil.

The first indication of variability is the yield map as after all this is the effect of what has gone before. The key then is to start to look as what has been the main cause of this variability. One of the causes is likely to be variable soil nitrogen supply as this is one of the main drivers of yield. Therefore an area to explore further which was covered at the conference last week is the nitrogen fertilizer application technique. Uniform nitrogen applications are still the norm, but a rapidly expanding method is variable rate applications.

By adopting this approach the Yara N Sensor has been shown to deliver, on average (from over 150 trials), an extra 3-4 % yield of wheat or oilseed with no additional fertilizer used. The most recent trials showed a 7% yield increase with 12% less nitrogen used, in addition to improving combine performance by 10-20%. Various other systems are now available either based on satellite images or tractor mounted sensors but they are more restricted on the crops they can be used on and they are not ‘real time’ solutions.

For further details contact ian.matts@yara.com