Category
Machinery & ERP
Description
Variable rate technology (VRT) is a new and powerful advancement in the precision agriculture revolution. VRT reduces input and labor costs while maintaining whole-farm profitability and increasing the sustainability of a grower’s farming practices.
VRT uses data and automation to apply fertilizer, crop protection products, seeds and even irrigation water at different rates in different locations without a grower having to change application rates or make multiple passes manually.
VRT works by using GPS and GIS technology to locate precise locations in the field for material application, combined with collected data that informs a VRT-enabled piece of equipment, such as a seeder, sprayer or fertilizer spreader, exactly where and at what rates to apply products.
The first step in VRT is to create farmer-developed management zones. These zones are typically mapped through the uniformity of their characteristics as determined by soil testing, yield monitoring results and other data such as remote sensing imagery. A standard management zone in a VRT system would map high, medium and low productivity areas within a field.
There are a number of questions that must be answered before establishing a site-specific crop management (SSCM) program. Many of these questions are economic, some are agronomic and environmental, and others are technology-related.
For the last couple of years, there has been a great advancement in understanding each part of the field, and manage the resources more efficiently according to that. Now the challenge is to get insights about how much money this new technology represets for the company.
This analytic helps to get that, by combining economic and GIS information to analyze both with the same granularity and in the same place.
Results
Gross Margin analysis by management zone
Data Delivery
- Vault Data Editor
- Vault Field Viewer
- BI Dashboards
