A key to unlocking sustainable outcomes and top performance across a field is understanding the changing environment within each acre, according to Jeremy Hogan, a Lead Agronomist with Advanced Agrilytics. He says precision agriculture technologies can help growers identify a lot of information about in-field environmental factors but often that data doesn’t go far enough.
He says the analysis and understanding behind that data needs to get down to the sub-acre level, evaluating all of the spatial environmental variability in the field. These small differences within each acre can influence critical success factors, like water movement across a field and available water for plant uptake. It also influences mineralization, which impacts nutrient management practices and ultimately drives a farmer’s ability to unlock performance across the entire field.
“Yield is an outcome, but it doesn’t define the true potential of every acre,” says Hogan. “At Advanced Agrilytics, our ultimate goal is to help growers identify these factors and put every acre in a position to win.”
Advanced Agrilytics agronomy staff help a grower come up with a sub-acre recipe for success, he says. Once analysis is conducted on the spatial variables, the agronomist can provide a stronger understanding of the risks and opportunities associated with each factor influencing performance on the acre. If a grower lacks the full picture of what is happening across each acre, and at the sub-acre level, they miss the chance to put the whole field in a position to win.
“Understanding this in-field environmental variability is one of the most important things that we as farmers and agronomists can do to influence performance,” adds Hogan. “Once we understand the separation of environment, then everything else works like it should. The problem today, in many cases, is that we do not understand the influence of environment in our fields, but we are managing like we do.”
Farmers who are seeking a deeper understanding of how to achieve total performance on each acre should reach out to Advanced Agrilytics and get connected with a personal agronomist.
