Tyson Redding walks through three crop yield prediction tools tested in Western Australia: PI Cal, iPatic, and Flexi N strips with Greenseeker NDVI sensors. Growers in 2015 trials used them to make faster fertiliser decisions and improve returns.
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As advances in crop yield predictive technology continue to accelerate, grain growers can expect to reap rewards from better input management, more confident grain marketing and potentially higher returns. In the Esperance port zone, the South East Premium Wheat Growers association is working with four growers to unravel the complexities of a range of in season yield prediction tools and and their effectiveness for local conditions. With funding from the Grains Research and Development Corporation, CEPWA is coordinating trials of the Potential Yield Calculator or PI Cal, the iPatic Yield Production Wise Nitrogen Rich Strips and Yield Profit to see how practical, accurate and worthwhile they are for decision making. CEPWA's Alice Butler explains how some of these technologies work and the potential benefits.
IPATIC yield runs off rainfall and crop yield from those years so monthly rainfall is inputted and then the crop yield at the end of the year over 10 years and that produces your own management curve. Enriched Strips looks at laying down a high rate strip of nitrogen and then using a green seeker to measure NDVI compares the greenness in that high rate strip to the rest of the paddock and from that you can kind of calculate how much you need to put on to get to a certain level of protein and paycal just looks at using rainfall during the season and with knowing rainfall at the start of the season and soil type to look at the potential yield for your area. So from knowing potential yield and gauging how well the season's going, you can get an understanding of how much of the input to put on.
Tyson Redding is one of the growers participating in the GRDC funded CEPWA Project D testing yield prediction tools on his Uncle Kenton and Aunt Jill Ware's Skadden property. As part of the project, Tyson set up nitrogen rich strip comparisons in 2015. These are strips that receive a high nitrogen rate and can then be compared to the paddock standard using a Greenseeker crop sensing system that measures normalised difference vegetation indices or ndvi. Tyson says the strips are a great in season visual reference to crop performance and and can be a big help with decision making to optimise yields and returns.
Flexi n rich strips they're just a hot strip of 200 litres to the hectare of flexi n and they're usually 100 to 200 meters long out in our paddocks and we just put them in varied areas on different soil types and we can use them in the paddock as a visual reference as we're spraying or as the agronomist is out checking our crops for weeds and that. So it's just an instant read of how the crops going and what it looks like and whether it needs more fertiliser or not. The flexi enrich strips are always good for us just because they provide an instant viewing in the paddock without having to use. You can use tools to measure them, but we just view them in the paddock and take from them what we can. So that's a good instant way. But we also find that eye paddock yield is good to give a longer term prediction of what the season's going to hold for us and whether we should be using more fertiliser or not. As a whole, with all the tools together, there's definitely, definitely sort of half a tonne to a tonne to be gained out of variable rate technology and the use of moisture probes and yield prediction tools.
Tyson says in future yield prediction in season decision making and other precision agriculture tools will need to provide quick, accessible and practical information to, to be beneficial for growers.
I think that's definitely where the future is going to go more towards robots and yeah, UAVs looking at different things in the paddock and getting a better overview of what's going on. Like the more information you have in the paddock and being able to access that information in the paddock is very important too. So that's. Yeah. And on the go it's got to be quick and it's got to be useful to us day to day. Like every day we're making decisions on what to do. You can't predict the rainfall, but there's certainly patterns and we can relate patterns of big years of rainfall to big years of yield and when we need to use more fertiliser. So that's important to us to know when to put more on and when to hold back.
