PHOTO: TAMME VAN DER WAL
PHOTO: MATT MCINTOSH
PHOTO: PETER GREDIG
GLOBAL VIEW ▶▶▶
How can small farmers adopt new technology?
BY MATT MCINTOSH M
any innovative planting and crop production solutions re- quire new equipment. Investing
in it can seem like an insurmountable hurdle for smaller-scale producers. However, there are more affordable ways to adopt novel ag- ronomic technologies – starting with the per- sonal pocket computers we all carry. Ontario grower Peter Gredig thinks better use of smartphone capabilities and accessing preci- sion planting technologies indirectly can help smaller producers take advantage of new technologies without putting their business- es on the line. “I feel like we’re missing a lot of really powerful tech that’s really cheap,” says the grain farmer and technology developer, who designs mobile products and strategies for the agriculture sector. His experience sug- gests that knowledge of what simple pro- grams can do – such as cloud-based record keeping and production apps, or those
allowing for efficient data sharing with agron- omists and other advisors – is not widely un- derstood. “You can take advantage of low-cost or free satellite imagery that tracks plant health through the season,” Gredig says. “Managing by productivity zones can be super simple when you have three zones with low, medium and high productivity. Most farmers can identify these zones from memory. Work forward from there.” Buying into new technology via a specialised service company, or as part of a pool with neighboring farms, can work well. You can work with your agronomist, get soil maps done without too much effort, and access precision technology fairly cheaply by hiring someone to do it. Aftermarket options for older equipment offer another avenue. But this approach can have limitations. “You could spend half the purchase price getting up to speed with new stuff.” Gredig also believes that the ability to make decisions from real-time data could, for small- er producers at least, prove more valuable
Peter Gredig: “It’s not about how much tech you have or can get; it’s about knowing what’s available and what makes the best fit.”
than the latest, most advanced pieces of equipment. “What I see people learning more from is the Internet of things and remote sen- sors that can tell you what kind of stresses are present, things that drive real-time decision making.”
Satellites can put farmers on the right track
BY TAMME VAN DER WAL T 66
he use of satellite data in agriculture has far greater potential than just creating task maps. Satellites can
help farmers to make better, faster and deeper assessments of their crops’ status. And, at the same time, this can help them to document their activities and events through monitor- ing. Around 30 years ago, my professor handed me four big magnetic data tapes containing a
single Landsat scene to analyse. I spent three months on ‘preprocessing’ before I could even look at the satellite photo. Today, within 24 hours after acquisition, imagery is ready for analysis and available to the whole world. What seems to have remained constant in all that time, however, is the high expectations of what can be done with satellite images in ag- riculture. Most (or perhaps all) services for farmers focus on making application maps or task maps: digital location-based instructions for computer-controlled machinery. This is one of the big promises of precision farming:
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 20 November 2020
you only give a plant the application it needs, so differences in crops receive different treat- ments. The frequent overpass of satellites however brings exciting new opportunities. The Coper- nicus programme has several different types of satellite, which were designed for different monitoring purposes. Other satellite constel- lations can be used for monitoring, for exam- ple, stress levels in crops. But how can we identify the cause of the stress? It’s not easy to tell if an observed lower NDVI (or any other vegetation index) is due to water stress,
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