Authors: Zoltán Szenek, Donát Szám

Myths and facts About Precision Agriculture – Part 2

Many farmers have spent money on precision tools, but they feel they are not getting the results they wanted. The problem is usually not the technology itself. The real challenge is to understand and use the data. In this article, we will show you the common myths and mistakes. If you avoid them, your work with precision farming can finally become more profitable.

Myth 5. The weather is the most important factor, so why plan so much? Droughts are becoming more frequent, it’s useless to plan at the zone level. A large part of the crop will be destroyed anyway.

Reality: This is exactly why it is profitable to plan for these fields. In an extreme case like a drought, you waste much more fertilizer and money with a single-rate application on areas that will fail.

We can all feel our climate changing dramatically in our own lifetimes. I remember when I was a child, we had such big snowfalls that I could barely move the snow with a shovel. Sometimes, schools were closed because you couldn’t even use the roads. And the idea of a summer heatwave was completely different from what it is now. In less than 15 years, the big snows have disappeared, and now there is almost no snow at all in this region. Meanwhile, the heatwaves get hotter and last longer every year.

This environment raises a fair question: “What is the point of expensive technology and precision planning if a drought will destroy most of the crop anyway?” This sounds like a logical question, but it is based on a common myth. This way of thinking ignores the most important benefit of precision farming: risk management and minimizing losses.

No field is truly homogene. Even in an area that looks flat, there are huge differences in the soil’s physical and chemical properties. From the perspective of a drought, the most important difference is the soil’s water-holding capacity.

In a single field there are good soil conditions with good water- and nutrient supply and sandy patches that are almost useless. It is impossible to predict what the season will be like, so let’s take the most extreme example: when there is a total draught, the poor parts of the field burn out and have a yield of almost zero.

• With a single-rate application, you are guaranteed to lose the seed and fertilizer you applied in these failed zones.
• But if we applied much less seed and fertilizer to these zones with a variable-rate plan, the financial loss is much smaller. Yes, even when you include the cost of planning, you still lose much less money.

Extreme weather events are becoming more common. How many seasons can a farm survive without conscious planning? We won’t answer that, because we want to be your partner not just in survival, but in minimizing risks and optimizing your costs. This is what makes your farm sustainable.

So, a drought is not an argument against site-specific farming. In fact, it is one of the strongest arguments for it.

Using a single application rate in these weather conditions is like expensive gambling where the bank always wins. The extra seed and fertilizer you put on the poor parts of the field create a guaranteed double loss.

Multi-temporal zone management, on the other hand, is a conscious risk management strategy. It’s about getting the most profit possible from your field. It allows us to put our money and resources where they have the best chance of a return, while we minimize the loss on the hopeless parts of the field.

In a drought year, the goal is not always a record harvest, but economic survival. And this is exactly where precision tools provide priceless help.

Myth 6. All zones are the same, no matter the year or the crop. Management zones are the same every year. This means you only need to create them once, and you never need to correct it.

Reality: Row crops (like corn) and cereal crops (like wheat) often perform very differently in the same zone; sometimes, their performance is the complete opposite.

While management zones are based on stable factors (like soil structure and topography), the reality is much more complex. The performance and potential of a zone are heavily influenced by two dynamic factors: the type of crop being grown and the specific weather conditions of that year.

The Problem of Inverse Yield

To understand a field’s true performance, you need several years of yield data. By averaging this data, we can create a zone map that allows us to plan application rates accurately. However, row crops (like corn) and cereal crops (like wheat) perform differently in the same zones.

The following pictures show yield maps from the AgLeader SMS program. It is easy to see that the same parts of the field behave as opposites in different years. This cannot be blamed only on the 2022 drought, because the corn in the southern part of the field performed well that year.

In the zone marked with the number 50, there is a sedimentary layer of gravel in the upper part of the soil. This layer is not present in the zone marked with number 51. The corn’s roots are strong enough to break through this gravel layer. Below it, there is a soil layer with good water-holding capacity.

This shows that the soil surface is just the tip of the iceberg. It is also very important to know what kind of soil is in the root zone. Often, completely different soil types are layered on top of each other.

In conclusion, the combination of soil conditions and the type of crop grown explains this anomaly. This example clearly shows that you cannot simply average the yields from every year together.

The Problem of the year effect

If the differences between crops were not enough, the weather in each specific year can also change the performance across a field. This means the idea of a “good” and a “bad” zone can become relative.

Let’s take an example from the Hungarian Great Plain. We analyzed several years of yield data from cereal and oilseed rape crops to create a zone map and made 3 different VRAs. The farmer was also surprised by the final result. The zones with good and bad performance were clearly different from each other, so we continued our planning based on this. This field above the pictures is a 36ha or 51 acre in Hungary which is totally flat and cropped by winter wheat in 2025.

However, this year brought some surprises in this field. The field received a near-average amount of rainfall, but the differences between the zones almost disappeared. This happened because the field received small amounts of rain several times, but always during the most optimal phenophases. This was enough for the weaker zones to catch up and perform almost as well as the better zones. We are saing for that, the once in a life. What could be happen, that happens.

Every Year is Different

We could not saying that every year is different. Because of all these factors, the correct method is to consciously review and fine-tune your planned management zones every year, based on the specific crop you are growing.

Also, our service for planning your nutrient inputs gets more precise every year as new yield data comes in. This allows us to determine the exact, zone-level application rates needed to provide the right amount of nutrients with greater and greater accuracy.

Myth 7. I should apply more inputs to the weaker parts of a field to improve them.

Reality: The performance of weaker zones cannot be improved by applying more nutrients. It is not profitable at all.

The term of the weak zone can mean two different things, because it’s important to know why a zone performs poorly.

• We are working with fields where are regular wildlife damage near good soil conditions. These areas have good potential because of their soil, but they cannot reach that potential because of the damage, especially with row crops. This brings us back to the problem of inverse yield. We call these zones with alternating yield performance because in cereal there is not nearly as strong wild damage like in row crops.
• The main reasons for classically poor zones are found in the soil properties or the topography. On flat land, these can be old riverbeds, sandy areas, or alkaline patches, which are naturally low-yielding spots. On hills, the topsoil has become thin or has disappeared completely due to erosion. As a result, these areas have a poor ability to provide nutrients and support for the plants.

As a result, these areas have a poor ability to provide nutrients and support for the crops. For this case (and naturally not for this only as you saw in the myth 6), it is mindless to apply extra nutrients to these and wild game damaged areas.

BUT! There are smart, practical, and low-cost methods that can significantly improve these areas over time if you use them consistently. This brings us to a complex set of technologies that build on each other, like min-till, strip-till, no-till, and cover crops. Some of these require expensive machines and a change in your way of farming. However, there is one method, especially for hilly areas, that you can almost certainly do with the machines you already have. The only extra cost is for the planning service, and its effect is significant. With just this one protective action, you can do a lot to improve your soil and the security of your yield. These are the grass strips, and we will soon write about this technology from a unique view. We will calculate with a modell counting the soil loss in these field without the grass strips. It will be worth to be with us.

Go back to Part 1 of “Facts and Myths about Precision Agriculture,” where we explain more myths to help you see clearly how this technology is useful in practice.

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