Unlock benefits from data

Precision irrigation is a whole-system approach to water management. It isn’t a single product, practice or method, but a comprehensive strategy that integrates advanced technologies and practices. One of the fundamentals of precision agriculture is data. It doesn’t matter how precisely you can apply water or fertilizer if you don’t know what is needed. That’s where data comes in.

The power of data

As a fourth-generation grower from eastern Nebraska, I’ve been thinking about how to get the most from my crops my whole farming career using pivots. My experience is proof that capturing data from the soil and crops can unlock tremendous value by boosting yields and saving time and resources.

My experience is proof that capturing data from the soil and crops can unlock tremendous value by boosting yields and saving time and resources.

When I first approached irrigation management, I realized that we needed more than educated guesses and rules of thumb. Managing irrigation without understanding soil moisture values and, more importantly, how soil moisture relates to the water-holding capacity of the field and the crop growth stage is like driving without a fuel gauge and an unknown fuel tank capacity. If you don’t know the size of the tank or the current fill level, you might fill it more often than necessary, failing to utilize its full capacity. Soil moisture data lets us know the size of the tank and provides us with a gauge to monitor it. This provides critical insight that helps avoid water and fertilizer loss through leaching below the root zone of your crop. If you are guessing about your crop’s water needs in season, even if you have a lot of seasons of experience, you are probably leaving money on the table.

How do you get this data? You collect it from devices like soil moisture sensors, which have come a long way from the early days of back-breaking installations and time-consuming data collection and interpretation. It is a lot easier than it used to be due to technological evolutions. Now the most sophisticated sensors send real-time data to the cloud and can be connected to data sources throughout the farm that can add weather, irrigation, fertigation and other kinds of data to leverage it into something greater than the sum of its parts. More recently, on-site evapotranspiration sensors complement soil moisture sensors by offering field-specific data about real-time crop water use.

Data in action

Here is an example of how this plays out on my farm. Soil moisture data combined with weather and crop growth stage helps get the timing right for the first irrigation. It helps me decide when and how much to irrigate in season, keeping soil moisture in the optimum range. It also helps me get the timing of the last irrigation right. Typically, making irrigation application decisions using data as a starting point saves 2-3 turns of the pivot per field. If you assume energy costs of roughly $500-1,000 per turn, as we see commonly in my region, that easily translates to thousands of dollars saved per field, per year, from electricity savings alone. Not only that, but I have been able to reduce fertilizer applications because the more sophisticated water management results in better nutrient uptake and improved efficiency.

The benefits aren’t only in savings. I have done side-by-side comparisons of corn and soybean fields, with one side using data management to aid my decisions and the other using standard methods. The results were eye-opening. The field that was managed with soil data resulted in more efficient plants with a deeper and more complex root structure and a yield boost between 10%-15%.

Soil and plant water data also unlocks the potential for variable rate irrigation. Many fields have variable soil types and topography, and we generally try to manage for the dominant soil type. But by making a minor change to a controller on a pivot (something that is easy to do and available on all pivot types), the speed of a pivot can be increased or decreased to control how much water is applied on a given portion of the pivot circle.

Soil moisture data combined with soil type mapping enables me to make an irrigation plan that changes the speed of the pivot over different sections of the pivot circle. This variable rate irrigation has allowed me to maximize the productivity of my most troublesome zones, bringing my weakest production zones up to their potential. Additional capabilities of these connected systems will enable other applications like variable rate fertigation. This is the reward from using connected, real-time field data to make agronomic decisions. Once again, these methods are not nearly as challenging as they used to be, due to the evolution of the latest products and technologies.

If a whole system approach appears daunting, consider that it doesn’t have to happen all in one season. It’s easy to get started with monitoring your crop’s moisture status. Many states have cost-share programs that can partially or even fully pay for the devices, and when purchased or leased through agronomy experts, you often gain the benefit of their expertise and installation assistance. It has never been easier to capture soil and crop data and benefit from it. From the resource savings, yield boosts, as well as the time savings and peace of mind that I get with real-time remote monitoring, the use of precision data technology is a no-brainer.

Nick Emanuel is a fourth-generation grower in eastern Nebraska, the U.S. head of product for CropX Technologies, Anaheim, California, and founder of CropMetrics, which was acquired by CropX in 2020.