Members and Prospective Members of the Precision Agriculture Research Association, (PARA)

Hi. My name is Christine Erlien and I am PARA's Interim Secretary. This is the second issue of the PARA newsletter, a quarterly endeavor. We have included articles form an Illinois member, Doug Harford, PARA's current President, Paul Reep, and current Vice President, Janice Mattson. Note the PARA meeting in the Master Calendar of events -- hands-on learning and election of PARA officers. Information about getting a grant to start up a farm club is also included in this issue. Enjoy, and send ideas for future articles to miletk@ida.net.

Hello, I'm Doug Harford. I farm with my wife Debby and our four children, seventy miles Southwest of Chicago on 1800 acres of flat black prairie soils. I have one full time employee, Clinton, who gives me the time to explore new ideas to keep our business fresh. My daughter, Becky, is a Landscape Architect and now works with me in the areas of Technology and Business Planning. We are 100% no-till, have been yield monitoring since 1992 (1993 successfully), grid soil sampling on 2.5 acre grids since 1976, and remote sensing with our own plane and with commercial companies for some time. Now my main interest is business planning and trying to understand how all of this will effect the future of agriculture. This is not meant to sound pretentious. I believe in difficult times we all need to work harder at understanding and reinventing our businesses. A new generation in agriculture is about to unfold.

Agriculture is not that different from other industries when it comes to the insertion of new technology. The applications of these new technologies usually yield the same results. Greater productivity, and greater efficiency. Technology usually envelops the areas of greatest efficiency and productivity first, because that is where the technicians work. The associated frustration should be predictable, but is rarely understood. Farmers are agriculture's technicians! In the 25 years I have farmed, I have tried to differentiate myself from my counterparts through efficiency. Better yields, no-till, and trying anything new to raise crops more efficiently. Results of my efforts have been interesting. I now farm what five people farmed when I began. With all these improvements my ten year average is slightly lower than in 1979, because it doesn't rain as much. I spend less on machinery than I did in the late 70s, even with much higher priced equipment. And most of my neighbors haul roughly the same bushels per acre to the elevator that I do, even though farming styles vary.

So where did the efficiency come from? It comes from scale, less people, and better financial management. That was not my plan, I thought I could out produce them all! When I came across Precision Farming, I thought this would be the edge. What I have learned from Precision Farming is this: Farmers already do a great job, the inefficient are for the most part gone, and greater gains in efficiency will come from areas other than producing more bulk commodities.

As agriculture's technicians we were the first to grasp these new technologies. We understood the promise of greater efficiency and understandably tried to apply it first to what we do best. Technology will have its greatest impact on our operations when we learn to apply it to what we do worst, or we will become the inefficient and therefor replaced. We will always have to be low cost producer, that is the price of admission to today's agriculture. Today's leading managers are learning to apply this technology to the business side of agriculture. The result will be to improve the same efficiencies, our generation benefitted from in our career. This improvement in efficiency will also reach the same point of diminishing returns we experienced in production. Tomorrow's leading managers will apply these technologies to new areas in the value chain that are just now emerging. If we learn how to raise two bushel more per acre, or cut cost by ten dollars per acre, and a neighbor uses this technology to get a contract that produces $100.00 more per acre who stays in business?

I would like to find a forum to discuss these future uses of technology. Will this organization be the right place? The rules of the game may change! Discussions may become uncomfortable at a point in many of our lives where we seek comfort. However the discussions will take place somewhere, and change will occur. One of the greatest business comforts came to me when technology gave me the opportunity to compare yields honestly with a neighbor who farms differently from myself. I discovered that for all my effort, the yields were the same, I could not control all the variability and there were opportunities in my business more important than a few bushels or a few dollars per acre.

What will those opportunities be? Information? Identity preservation? Branding? Any of these would be great topics of discussion, but the real question may be: What new relationship do I need to cultivate, or how do we share information in the future?

-Doug

Producer's Corner II

By, Janice and Carl Mattson

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1998 was a cropping year we are anxious to forget. We had a dry 1996, and on May 31,1997 we received one general rain for the entire 1997 cropping year. Come spring of 1998 we thought, surely, 1998 would be better. We received one general rain this cropping year on July 4. Needless to say, since we are in a recropping practice, things did not look good early on.

With virtually no stand, dry topsoil, and no sign of significant moisture in the forecast, we found ourselves in a dilemma. Do we cut our costs and spray out the crop or hope and pray for immediate moisture? At about that same time Dr. Gerald Nielsen, from MSU, sent us some NDVI images. NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) are satellite images that can be used as a way of expressing the amount of biomass or "greenness" on the land. In addition to these images, Dr. Nielsen's office also included a graph of a 10 year average greenness index of our area. The ten-year average showed it was very dry (not green), abnormally so, in our area.

Although the resolution of these NDVI images is only about one kilometer, we were able to identify the areas around us that we had already noticed were as dry or drier. We had physically noticed that the east side of our property seemed to be on the border of dry, becoming greener as we traveled east across the neighbor's crops. The NDVI correctly showed this difference in greenness.

We can't say having the NDVI in our hands made the decision for us to spray out our crop and collect Federal Crop Insurance, but it did help us in seeing the total picture. We saw that the drought surrounding us was indeed a real thing, it was much drier than a ten year average, and made us feel a "little" better in knowing that we weren't the only farm involved.

We do believe we need images giving us a higher spatial resolution than the NDVI images to make any field-size management decisions. However, seeing these NDVI images showed us the broad picture, and gave us a great deal of optimism when it comes to satellite images. Perhaps with the more detailed images possible with the new satellites going up, there may be a vast amount of knowledge we can apply to our management decisions. Time will tell. We are thankful that there are individuals and institutions interested in applying this technology to farming issues and helping us to ascertain what it all is telling us. Let's hope for a better 1999.

Industry Perspectives: A New Opportunity?
Paul Reep, Milestone Technology, Inc.

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With grain and livestock prices so depressed, producers are really beginning to wonder what to do. Some are even at the point of panic and going broke. So why should producers continue to be interested in technology, even during these times of financial distress and distraction? There are many opportunities on the horizon, some of which are relatively near term. PARA exists in part to identify these opportunities and share them with member producers.

I have attended several meetings this summer. The U.S. Grains Council, the 4th International Conference on Precision Agriculture in Minnesota and a conference on geospatial information in agriculture at the Epcot Center in Florida. Technology will not sell if there is no buying power. So-- you are as efficient as you can possibly be. Where, then, are the opportunities, and when are some of the new markets that have been promised for years going to open up?

One meeting in particular, with the Department of Energy and members of the chemical industry, struck me. The purpose of the meeting was to map the near- and far-term research and investment needs to develop new opportunities for producers by using agricultural materials as feedstocks to produce commodity chemicals. This program is not at all about making ethanol/methanol and renewable energy supplies. Those ideas are not new and have met with limited success – at least for producers. Rather, this program will focus on the ability to convert starches and sugars directly to fundamental carbon building blocks to produce glycerine, solvents, adhesives, pharmaceuticals, ag chemicals and other industrial materials, that have been previously derived from gas and oil stocks.

So, what does this have to do with precision farming? There have been two technology gap areas that have prevented successful (economic) agriculture carbohydrate conversion for these purposes. The ability to develop a biocatalyst that can survive higher processing temperatures and the ability to characterize the feedstock material in the field, before it is mixed or blended, have been missing links. Granted, this short list is quite oversimplified, but tremendous progress is being made in biotechnology and sensor technology to bring these opportunities about. The linkage between precision farming (knowing what you are doing and where you are doing it) can be visualized through the knowledge gained by yield monitoring, quality sensing, and using other precision agriculture tools. The DOE Initiative in this area could hold great promise for producers who have the information about their crops as feedstocks, which could represent a robust new market opportunity.

Another indicator that this concept may be gaining momentum is the recent reorganization of key players in the agriculture industry. Seed companies and chemical companies are forming partnerships, strategic alliances and joint ventures to take advantage of developments in plant genome research, transgenics and identity-preserved programs, e.g. Cargill-Monsanto, Pioneer-DuPont, and Mycogen-Dow. It appears that the private sector investment is directed and substantial.

Fund for Rural America: Consortium for Site-Specific Management

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One of the goals of the Consortium is to assess the potential of precision agriculture practices for improving crop quality. Work in Montana will focus on wheat, testing a new precision N management strategy that uses on-the-go yield sensing and grain protein levels to derive maps for N fertility requirements. Another of the Consortium goals is to create local precision agriculture learning teams, in which local producers will work in conjunction with Consortium members to design experiments, sample, analyze data, and make management decisions.

Remote Sensing Technology and Your Operation
Paul Reep

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We were all able to watch the developments of Hurricane George, complements of remote sensing technology from various satellites. These remote images from space were easy for the novice to interpret as valuable INFORMATION for decision makers, emergency agencies and the residents of the Mississippi Delta in helping prevent losses of life and property. Progress was recently made with the help of MSU's Remote Sensing Lab (see Producer's Corner) to help make some critical decisions (avert disaster) for a local PARA producer.

Recently I participated in remote sensing meeting in Big Sky, Montana, that was sponsored by SUNEI, the State Agriculture Experiment Stations (SAES) USDA-Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES) National Environmental Initiative. Part of this meeting was directed by NASA Goddard's Proactive Outreach Activities. SUNEI is working with the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium (UMAC), of which Montana State University and the University of Montana are members, to develop better information for producers, livestock and range land operations from remotely sensed data products generated by NASA. Several producer groups from Montana were represented as well as producers from other surrounding states. Several Australians were in attendance as well. Remote sensing specialists were there from the University of Montana and MSU, other member Land Grant colleges to discuss what was really needed for agriculture in our area. Some excellent examples were given by users of remote sensing products. One such example was from Ten Sleep, Wyoming. Jim Foreman, who runs a cattle operation near there, showed how he was able to develop a strategy for when to take the animals off pastures and how to optimize grazing. He uses simple vegetative index and infrared maps available on the Internet. NASA Goddard provided some additional information on how to get remote sensing products.

The following NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAAC) can be found on the Web:

1) Eros Data Center (Land Processes) http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/landaac

2) Goddard Space Flight Center (Upper Atmosphere, Atmospheric Dynamics) http://daac/gsfc.nasa.gov

Alternative Energy Resource Association (AERO) Farm Clubs

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Alternative Energy Resources Organizations (AERO) offers grants in amounts of up to $1,000 each to local groups of Montana farmers, ranchers, and community members to undertake projects geared toward developing practical ways of sustaining agriculture and communities over the long-term. AERO awards these grants to new and continuing Farm & Ranch Clubs across Montana. A farm improvement club is a group of at least four people who organize and drive the club projects. Each club is responsible for the following: 1) planning and completing their project as a group and 2) writing an annual report and taking part in the annual gathering of all clubs in November to share experiences and ideas. Clubs in their 2nd or 3rd years will host a farm or range tour, educational event, forum, or social gathering for their local community. Along with the grant, each club receives technical, organizational, and networking support from AERO.

Grants are awarded to a prospective club after a technical review committee made up of AERO members and staff carefully considers all proposals. A request for proposals will be issued later this winter. Final project selection will be made in the spring. A few examples of the types of groups supported by AERO are those working to: 1) enhance soil, range, and riparian health, 2) maintain and enhance farm and ranch profitability, along with rural community vitality, and 3) develop sustainable agricultural products, as well as processing and marketing strategies.

Applications and additional information can be obtained by contacting:
AERO - 25 S. Ewing, Suite 214, Helena, MT 59601
Phone: (406) 443-7272, Fax: (406) 442-9120, E-mail: aero@desktop.org

Master Calendar

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Montana Grain Growers Committee December 2-4, 1998
Contact: Randy Johnson
406-761-4596

PARA/UMAC
January 13-15, 1998
This meeting is for PARA members who are already participating in research through the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium (UMAC). This will be an opportunity to get hands-on experience with farm/ranch oriented software packages, to plan for applications of remote sensing (aerial and satellite imagery) technologies, and to explore rangeland applications of remote sensing and spatial data. PARA will also elect officers and set goals. Space is limited to 10 producers, so if you are interested, contact Jerry Nielsen at 406-994-5075 or Christine Erlien at 406-994-6034.

Western Precision Agriculture Conf.
Combining Mgmt and Technology for Higher Profits
February 10 11, 1998
Boise, Idaho
www.eus.wsu.edu/c&i/programs/precisionag.htm
Washington State University, in cooperation with the University of Idaho and the Idaho Precision Agriculture Association, are sponsoring an intensive two-day conference focusing on precision farming. The Western Precision Agriculture Conference is targeted to help growers of dryland and irrigated crops including perennial fruits. Learn how precision farming can be used in potato, sugarbeet, corn, apple, grape, vegetable, dryland and irrigated wheat, and dryland legume production. Over 350 are expected to attend, including growers, farm managers.

Speakers will make presentations on:1) using precision farming tools, 2) understanding the technologies in precision agriculture, 3) assessing field variability, 4) optimizing production practices, and 5) incorporating precision farming into a farm operation. Vendors exhibits, two lunches, an evening social and a booklet of abstracts are included in the registration fee.

2nd European Conference on Precision Agriculture
July 11-15, 1999
Odense Congress Centre, Denmark
www.sri.bbsrc.ac.uk

For membership or other information: Contact: Bruce Wright at osmose@aol.com or Chris Erlien at cerlien@montana.edu