If You're Going to do Precision Ag, It's Best to be Precise
Jan 09, 2020
If you’re serious about maximizing your farm’s ROI, then it’s important to manage your farm on a field-by-field basis. The boundary is your starting point—the foundational piece of data needed to organize your fields’ information in order to ensure the decisions you’re making will yield the best results agronomically and economically.
The quality of a field’s boundary directly effects the quality of information that you can use to analyze how well your decisions faired for a single year or across multiple years. Because of this, it is a best management practice to obtain accurate field boundaries. We have compiled a list of farming functions that can be affected by a boundary and provided how each function can impact a decision you make that could ultimately affect your bottom line.
Input and Output Management
Accurate acreage can be figured for seed and chemical inputs by excluding turn rows and non-arable parts of the field through accurate boundary creation, allowing you to purchase and apply exactly what you need, where you need it. GreenPoint AG’s ag technology program, Incompass®, also allows for you to house a record of that application through an as-planted or as-applied map (fertility or chemical application). When it comes to yield data, accurate boundaries will only take into account the arable land, giving you an accurate yield of that field.
Logistics and Communication
Having boundaries housed in Incompass® can increase your ability to communicate with new employees, delivery drivers, custom applicators, farm managers and crop scouts. The field naming structure creates the standard for how all parties refer to a field. A map book can be printed or delivered digitally that includes a bird’s eye view of the entire farm as well as individual, detailed field pages that includes the preferred field name, acreage and GPS coordinates.
Servicing You, Our Customer
It allows for us to optimize our delivery routes so we’re servicing you the best we can. Housing boundaries in Incompass® allows a GreenPoint AG representative to pinpoint an exact location of a particular field for product drop off by a delivery driver as well as provide details when collecting soil and tissue samples.
As-Planted Maps, As-Applied, Yield Data
If you have accurate data, then you can then make a more precise analysis of your cost/acre. In turn, it gives a granular view of a field’s ROI. Boundaries serve as the foundation for the accuracy of as-planted, as-applied and yield data.
Record Keeping
As a customer you have access to view all of your records in an organized fashion. Meaning, if your farm notebook gets destroyed, your application records are held within Incompass® and tied to a field boundary as long as the information is collected within a data collection system. Reports can be provided to aid in the fulfillment of NRCS program contracts, crop insurance needs and proof of previous yields for lenders and product failure claims.
Consistency Across Data Collection Systems
In order to see trends across a farm or field your maps need to match for your data interpretation to be accurate. Housing an accurate boundary in Incompass® allows for your information to be consistent and transferable across various data collection systems. This becomes valuable when you want to overlay data to look at a field or farm’s progression or regression. An example of this would be looking at your soil sample data in Incompass® next to your yield data from Climate FieldView™ to make an adjustment to your fertility needs.
Building Management Zones
Field trials are key to determining how a new product fits on your farm. Management zones can be used to keep track of specific treatment areas of a field, create flat rate controller files for chemical, fertilizer, irrigation, or seeding applications, and can be used in conjunction with data sets for dynamic data analysis. No more guessing whether or not a trial yielded a benefit on a specific field.
Variable Rate Prescriptions
If we cannot variable rate, then we are not capitalizing on the opportunity to put seed, fertility and chemical applications where they are needed. Variable rate prescriptions require a boundary in order to be created.
Interested in getting started with Incompass®? Reach out to your local GreenPoint AG to get started with an Ag Technology Specialist (ATS). The ATS will work with you to map your fields in Incompass® and name them how you would like. When mapping on the desktop, the background map is not always geographically accurate, and it is hard to differentiate the arable vs nonarable land. The ATS will physically drive an ATV around the field with a GPS to ensure your boundaries are accurate and will then guide you through the remaining steps to import data that you might already have collected or get started collecting data so you can be well on your way to making data-driven decisions for your operation.
The quality of a field’s boundary directly effects the quality of information that you can use to analyze how well your decisions faired for a single year or across multiple years. Because of this, it is a best management practice to obtain accurate field boundaries. We have compiled a list of farming functions that can be affected by a boundary and provided how each function can impact a decision you make that could ultimately affect your bottom line.
Input and Output Management
Accurate acreage can be figured for seed and chemical inputs by excluding turn rows and non-arable parts of the field through accurate boundary creation, allowing you to purchase and apply exactly what you need, where you need it. GreenPoint AG’s ag technology program, Incompass®, also allows for you to house a record of that application through an as-planted or as-applied map (fertility or chemical application). When it comes to yield data, accurate boundaries will only take into account the arable land, giving you an accurate yield of that field.
Logistics and Communication
Having boundaries housed in Incompass® can increase your ability to communicate with new employees, delivery drivers, custom applicators, farm managers and crop scouts. The field naming structure creates the standard for how all parties refer to a field. A map book can be printed or delivered digitally that includes a bird’s eye view of the entire farm as well as individual, detailed field pages that includes the preferred field name, acreage and GPS coordinates.
Servicing You, Our Customer
It allows for us to optimize our delivery routes so we’re servicing you the best we can. Housing boundaries in Incompass® allows a GreenPoint AG representative to pinpoint an exact location of a particular field for product drop off by a delivery driver as well as provide details when collecting soil and tissue samples.
As-Planted Maps, As-Applied, Yield Data
If you have accurate data, then you can then make a more precise analysis of your cost/acre. In turn, it gives a granular view of a field’s ROI. Boundaries serve as the foundation for the accuracy of as-planted, as-applied and yield data.
Record Keeping
As a customer you have access to view all of your records in an organized fashion. Meaning, if your farm notebook gets destroyed, your application records are held within Incompass® and tied to a field boundary as long as the information is collected within a data collection system. Reports can be provided to aid in the fulfillment of NRCS program contracts, crop insurance needs and proof of previous yields for lenders and product failure claims.
Consistency Across Data Collection Systems
In order to see trends across a farm or field your maps need to match for your data interpretation to be accurate. Housing an accurate boundary in Incompass® allows for your information to be consistent and transferable across various data collection systems. This becomes valuable when you want to overlay data to look at a field or farm’s progression or regression. An example of this would be looking at your soil sample data in Incompass® next to your yield data from Climate FieldView™ to make an adjustment to your fertility needs.
Building Management Zones
Field trials are key to determining how a new product fits on your farm. Management zones can be used to keep track of specific treatment areas of a field, create flat rate controller files for chemical, fertilizer, irrigation, or seeding applications, and can be used in conjunction with data sets for dynamic data analysis. No more guessing whether or not a trial yielded a benefit on a specific field.
Variable Rate Prescriptions
If we cannot variable rate, then we are not capitalizing on the opportunity to put seed, fertility and chemical applications where they are needed. Variable rate prescriptions require a boundary in order to be created.
Interested in getting started with Incompass®? Reach out to your local GreenPoint AG to get started with an Ag Technology Specialist (ATS). The ATS will work with you to map your fields in Incompass® and name them how you would like. When mapping on the desktop, the background map is not always geographically accurate, and it is hard to differentiate the arable vs nonarable land. The ATS will physically drive an ATV around the field with a GPS to ensure your boundaries are accurate and will then guide you through the remaining steps to import data that you might already have collected or get started collecting data so you can be well on your way to making data-driven decisions for your operation.