 Welcome to Precision Agriculture in Southeast. With me today is Dr. John Fulton, our Auburn University Precision Ag Specialist, our Extension Agronomy Team Leader, our Alpha Eminent Scholar, and all kind of good stuff. We're thankful to have you with us today, John. In our last lesson, we talked about yield monitoring, and today you're going to tell us about yield mapping. So we go from how it's done to what you do with it. So we encourage everyone to go and really focus on the yield monitoring. We talked about cotton and really focused in on grain and how we're measuring things on those harvesters to come up with a yield measurement. Now is the key, is really trying to make money out of this as we generate these maps. So we look at that picture here on the first slide and we're trying to take what we see out there in our crop and also paint these pictures that represent how the yield varies across. And so it's really a key layer. When we talk about site-specific management, it's an enabling data layer. And we talked about how important it is to have the farmer knowledge as a data layer as we develop or as a farmer develops their precision ag program. But secondly, all of a sudden the yield, because it was really not only the report card, but it gives us that data set to look at the yield variability and more importantly, where am I making money potentially and where am I losing money and what can I do, especially if I'm losing money, to make some decisions to improve the profitability in those areas. John, to me the maps, the data is overwhelming. It's just too much stuff, but I can look at a map or a farmer can look at the map and it shows us his sweet spots and the sour spots and how he's doing in broad strokes without being overwhelmed. So we talked about that in the yield monitoring. You were concerned that you didn't want to see all that data. It's just too much. It's too much. But when we talk about visualizing data, come up with a map, all of a sudden some things will start to click. Ah, you know, I know why that happened or hey, I need to go out there and maybe look at this a little bit more. Why am I getting low yields? So with that, just as a refresher, a yield map can tell us a lot of things. You know, on the forefront, a lot of folks quickly recognize some drainage issues. But you know, it can be used for a lot of things as we talked about in the yield monitoring section. But then today it is a map and so it doesn't tell us why maybe things are occurring or why the yield is, but it gives us the response that hopefully we can do some of our own either analysis and can act on that and improve our profitability not only for the field but maybe within the field and improve the profitability in some areas. So the key uses, we talked about this again, but just to highlight, really there's a lot of uses. It's infinite, but diagnosing crop production problems, really understanding the yield potential out there in the field. Those are really going to be critical as we move forward and from an environmental standpoint only making sure that we're applying what we need to the crop but ultimately it can give us the yield potential for that field and we can manage to that. Even doing some of the variable rate strategies, we might be able to really manage to that yield potential. And finally we encourage all of our farmers, once they have some of these tools, space to yield monitoring to generate yield maps, that we can do some on-farm research. What works for me? What kind of impact can it have on my operation? And that's really a key thing today is to do some on-farm research to see how products or practices are influencing. It might be the thing that I need to be investigating or investing in some cases to further my operation into the future. John, one thing I think about is working with your landlords. You could give them that in my up and say we've got a bad spot here or maybe I need a 10-year lease because I've got to fix this problem. And it's a communication tool, not just for your understanding but for working with your ag professional. When your consultant comes, I've got that problem. What do we need to do with that bill? Yeah, we've been very lucky as a team to work with some very progressive producers and that's one of the things they say from a lease perspective. All of them are leased in land today but I can really have a better relationship with my landlords so there's a really a key ingredient there is having their field maps and showing them. The other thing I'm interested in a lot is if I've got soil types and start to collect yield data on my farm, all of a sudden I can be looking at leasing another farm and looking at how much can I afford knowing the soils. I can get the soil maps and some information from that farm and I can transpose or basically take some of my data and say this is what we could do and kind of negotiate what the real price I'm willing to give for a rental agreement. So there's some real value in just these yield monitors beyond what we put on the screen there. So just remember this is what you didn't want to see Mark all this data and we're trying to turn that around to these maps we're looking at the good areas, the bad areas and so how's my irrigated versus non-irrigated but again all we're looking at is yield variability and trying to act on that and learn from it and change things as we go along to retain profitability. A little bit about patterns. Mark if you see a straight line hopefully you're thinking that's either a driveway or that's a man-made travel path across there so we've got to kind of keep that in mind. It's really these irregular patterns that we want to look at and see what we can manage and do about that. So in this field we knew we had some issues with weeds over in the one area so that's something we probably need to focus on next year when we get to spray around and start running on our pre and post type programs. So again there's straight lines that's man-made but the regular patterns is really what we want to focus on so just keep those in mind. There's many causes of variability Mark. You can probably go back in your career and we can talk about anything, just all the developments and products and things that we've tried over the years but so there's a lot of causes. We don't determine the cause with the yield maps but they do expose that cause and we can again act upon it. All we're getting is the location and we get the magnitude hopefully of the difference between a high yield or low yield or how much adjacent areas might be yielding against each other. So ultimately what we're trying to drive to is these improved management decisions at the farm level. So when we talk about yield variability just something to think about on the front end. What can I manage? What can I change? So fertility, seeding or what I would call about any of my crop inputs I can change. And then there's these attributes that we can only manage so soil physical properties, we've got terrain we might have other things out there we can manage but we're not going to really change them. That's a long term change as we look at it. So there's things that we can change and then there's the variability that we're going to have to manage around. So just keep that in mind as you build your programs or if you're trying to build a service around that. These are two areas that we're managing on one end but we can change things on the other end. So prescribing spatial inputs, just remember and I'm just throwing this question out because we talk about how important yield maps are to a lot of the services and what a lot of these services are looking at is trying to help you build nutrient management plans. Prescription maps is the easy entry level but as they develop these models isn't crop yield potential really the important ingredient there? If I know what that is or have a good handle given a particular season of what the yield potential is all of a sudden we can manage that and so that's what a lot of these services are building is trying these models, it's the yield potential that they're really trying to drive down to and understand how that variability looks out in that field given different growing seasons. We can develop seeding maps, vibrate seeding maps, corn but I think in the day we want to know what the yield variation is there if we're really going to take time and derive prescription maps to do vibrate seeding and we've got several case studies of farmers in this state that are doing vibrate seeding, corn it's taken several years but what they'll tell you is yield maps is one of the most important and critical data layers to help them. So we need yield maps to do all this again we've got a lot of services that are rolling out from companies and yield data will be the first thing they ask or yield maps. We talked about errors in yield monitoring section how do we correct those? Okay, I'm just going to go through some of these a lot of the farm management information systems or AGGIS was the terminology have ways to kind of eliminate these errors or correct those errors so be aware of that if you're buying or if someone's helping you with your yield data I would really ask them if they're half the capabilities to get some of these errors. We've seen quite a bit of difference it could change your decision in some areas just because of some of the errors getting rid of those errors you kind of drive to what the real yield variability is and can make the right decisions. John that goes back to what you've said several times during the course it's who you're working with. Absolutely. I mean who that person on the ground is really it's almost as important as what brand you choose you've got to have good support. Support and the capabilities that do some of the detailed work that's required with these data sets. So we've already talked about this but the solutions is try to remove as much as Arrhenius data as possible prior to doing any type of analysis most of the farm management information systems or software packages out there have some ways to help you make this an easy task or most of the service providers should have that in house so if I'm asking you to help me manage and develop I'm giving you yield data let's make sure that we can clean up some of these yield maps. There is a free version it'll be some of the information I'll go over it quick but there is a yield editor developed by the guys out in Missouri USDA ARS they typically do some of this but it takes time but it is out there. So going back we're measuring things Mark we're measuring mass flow in that green combine we're measuring moisture content most of these moisture meters are very accurate between 10 and 30 to 33% so also if I get a moisture measurement of 38% I don't have confidence that that's really 38% so you need to get out of the field and fix that shouldn't be in the field first of all probably but just think about it there's limitations on any sensors and just keep that in mind and so distance or speed what's the minimum harvest speed and what's the maximum I think anyone could tell you that it would be hard pressed to be harvesting at 8 or 9 miles an hour so also if we see large distances suggesting large speed we might have an issue with that whatever is measuring the speed so just keep those things in mind cut width we want to make sure that's as accurate we talked about that that can influence yield dramatically but those first three ones are really what we're measuring constantly every second we're getting a measurement and an estimate of those so think about that we got GPS differential correction Mark we talked about that it could be somewhere a meter to 20 meters off so we want that true today most of the GPS receivers do an excellent job of not losing differential correction or really minimizing errors so that is not a problem or what we see as a problem today as we once did back in 10, 15 years ago and then there's always operator error I hate to bring that up Mark but we all operate a little differently we put the cut width we're not paying attention you know the old saying there's drivers and there's operators and it's the end of day versus morning and there's that pushing that I mean some years in corn harvest man they just you work so many hours that mistakes are going to happen yeah and so all I'll say is a lot of people like to go into their yield data and let's take grain and corn I've got 500 bushel and I'm just going to throw out anything about 400 bushel and I'm going to throw out all my zero as well I get a little bit of answer because we do have some fields that have zero but it's just drought or we get excessive rain and we get zero we want to know that and most of the time it's not that it's 500 bushel it's the fact that I moved a little distance but I got a high mass flow rate and I got that it's not that it's the yield's wrong but it's the mass flow or the distance measurement was wrong so why not focus on getting those making sure all that is right and not worrying so much about the yield so we just John I've seen a lot of zero and I haven't seen any 500 no so just think about using your what's being measured and focus on those measurements and the limitations on those hey here's the lag time we talked about that from one of our farms and we didn't have the lag time and all of a sudden when you start or when you come out on adjacent all of a sudden those data points aren't lining up you know we don't want to see this and so again as an operator this is something I need to set in my to say when should this data recording stop because you might put your head down five foot from when I doing corn for example for me I put my head down start to put it down right when I hit the edge of the stalks and so there's a difference there and I can adjust that if you don't adjust it right this is what occurs and we know that's not quite correct log in data when I'm turning around all of a sudden I get a lot of reds occurring out in the field can I clean some of that up because again that's going to affect how the yield map looks on the end so is your header height up and down set properly or you got someone that's helping you out and they're just keeping the header down you know we've got to get rid of some of this to clean it up and we'll show you some maps where this occurs okay correcting yield data the biggest thing I tell most people especially if you're in the data services just generate the yield maps for a producer look at them and I think you'll very quickly see there's some things we need to clean up real quick before we put this into some kind of analysis or start deriving information from it okay we can filter or delete those Iranian's data again most of the you know farm works ag leaders SMS they've got some filtering and capabilities that can really help you but most service providers if you're getting someone to help you with that should be able to help you get those Iranian's and let's get them out of there so what we're working with is true and the best of our knowledge representation of the field typically for grain yield monitors I'll make this comment from this is many processing a lot of yield data over the years the distance and moisture content will clean up most of those yield maps okay I'm going down and all of a sudden I got an issue I pull back on my pull back on my hydrostat well my distance went down to hardly just a few inches but yet I still got grain coming up there so guess what spikes 500 you know so this is the kind of thing I can get rid of that and most of the time in our examples you're going to delete less than 10% of the data points out there so you're not really changing anything if you're not our rule of thumb is you're deleting a lot more than 10% there's a problem on the harvester themselves sorry about that but there's something you probably need to look into on the yield monitor or the harvester itself as you start to get in high high percentage of deleting data so that's just a good rule of thumb let's get down and talk about yield maps we're trying to generate knowledge you know we've already been through all this I really like you know a lot of these are just some pretty obvious looking at varieties looking at seeding rates the timing of fertilizer if I'm trying to do multiple applications of nitrogen versus how I traditionally do it in a single or split you know the rates of nitrogen any of these type of things we can use yield monitors how about strip tillage a lot of guys interested in strip tillage but what does that mean to me and some other practices and so there's a lot of things out there but the interesting thing is you know we can do split planter stuff today you know I've got a 12 row planter 6 row header and I can split that planter with A and B harvested separately and very quickly have some good replicated answers for my farm about what that might mean and then finally change rates which each pass you know I can come out with you know change the rate with each pass and just look at do I get a response so a lot of things that you can do but then the day that yield map can verify if a response exists or not it's more knowledge in my pocket that I can use for the future just a minute I think this is from the Glen Farms up north just an idea that here you know we see some differences as crops change but for the most part you see the spatial trends are very similar and so all of a sudden I've got high yielding in some areas I've got some low yielding and as you know they've really capitalized and started to reverberate MP and K on a lot of this and lime okay well I like that John showing on the different crops your sweet spot is a sweet spot and corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton whatever and your bad spot so where are you going to where are you going to focus Mark where are you going to focus oh good ground makes good money absolutely and so it's a business here's an example of yield maps that basically confirm we had some pH issues occurring on the right side of that field but after we got those corrected and we came back with a subsequent wheat crop look how much nicer on the right all of a sudden we went from a red to a green and so again site specific management John looking at that map is that a turn around or is it shading effect you know we got the rim of red could that be shading a trick from trees or other issues or is it a turn around so you could have a shading effect no doubt about it we know that exists in this case there's a turn in some of those areas that you're seeing red around the periphery is some turning so again that was going back to what we talked about prior maybe some of those need to be removed to better represent reality but it could be a shading effect we don't want to remove them if that's reality so saying it's zeros or anything below 10 I'm not comfortable with that because this might be real numbers that we want to keep but no we wouldn't know the impact of getting our pH right if we didn't have a yield map and I can quantify that today I can pencil out what that meant to my pocketbook mark by making that simple adjustment and getting out and verberating live and correcting that was a tremendous impact on profitability some other things that we can take yield maps and do it can do a lot more this is not all inclusive but we've got crop moisture so we're trying to open up fields once my moisture I can take a run across the field and kind of get a glimpse of how much variability there is in moisture and make that decision whether I want to harvest or not or as I load out and I kind of keep it in mind what my moisture content is and what I might need to be doing in this system, those type of things I think the real key in what we're trying to promote is profit maps yield maps are wonderful tools but the profit maps get down to maybe I need to be making a decision differently in a field I can look at operator behavior what's my field efficiency how many acres per hour can I get out of that machine and it's very interesting you get multiple machines running mark and looking at this efficiency and what a machine can cover in a day you would be amazed how much operators can vary and so are they doing a good job or are they doing a bad job those are some of the things that you can pull out of this data and not have to be necessary at the field you can do that post processing other things we got markers or flags, capabilities built in I can mark issues out in the field, weed areas I might have had emergence issues sometimes and I'll show an example of that I can mark whatever I want out there I can mark something and if I'm working for you mark I can mark and say I think you need to go back out and look right here there's something not wrong we didn't get anything emerging there's something seems to be occurring or hey we got excessive weed it's back in the back corner it's not easy to see but it's right here to go back in so we can collect all that while we're out harvesting here's an example that we collected this is a yield map and basically the shaded purple areas is where weeds impacted not only yield but emergence mark in that lower right corner we had basically nothing out there to harvest very little another interesting thing that we can notice is number one we have a weed issue that I think next year better focus on because it had a dramatic impact but the interesting thing we had a young man that was operating the planter for the first time he started on the bottom of that field and made his way up towards the north side of it but when he got up to about two thirds you'll see he changed directions and all of a sudden a lot of short rows in that top left corner of that field back and forth a lot of turning and I'll tell you actually I was the one harvesting this field I did more time turning I did harvesting just because as a young person not knowing the field that they made a decision to start planning basically perpendicular the way they were doing and all of a sudden the efficiency went way down but a very good teaching moment that we could get out of this yield data and so listen let's next year start here and let's keep all our rows parallel and so again just some things more than yield that we can pull out and start to look at things profit maps man this is really where we want guys looking you can see at the bottom but basically we can look at profit based on the yield we can know our gross income minus our cost if we got a good estimate we can plug those in and most of these ag GIS or farm management information systems you can do this very quickly you just put in your cost and it'll pop this out for you and you can see like normal edges of the field a lot of time we're not making money can I do something different there do I have some shading maybe I can maybe do some pruning or just get rid of the fence line per se where the trees are growing maybe I can remove it from production mark maybe I can enroll it in a buffer strip if it's the longest string these are kind of things that we can also take something that's non profitable and turn it to be profitable so I just want to mention this before we end I've mentioned we've talked about this there's a lot of precision ag services out there today Mark that are really not only are existed but are starting to roll out and guess what they want what data data layer they want profit and they want your yield maps to help them better serve you they want to understand your growing environment they got to have yield maps in order to establish at what's your yield potential these services are helping you organize and view your precision ag data a lot of times they're bringing an agronomy aspect to kind of be an agronomy consultant but building that spatial or site specific management programs that we've seen in some of the earlier maps in this session but all these services are rolled out you can go out today and not all these are available today in Alabama I'm just saying all of our input suppliers we've got field seed pioneer has field 360 we've got monsanto in their field we've got helina ag or afc all rolling out services to help manage data but to drive information back to the farmer to make changes and they want yield data they will tell you that's probably number one under priority and so just keep that in mind that this yield map is really an important key and I think that's why we've seen it not only that the yield monitors are coming on the harvesters as standard today but the fact that farmers wanting to sign up recognize hey I need yield maps that will allow them to give me the service that I expect so at the end I can't emphasize that yield mapping is such a critical data layer especially when we start talking about these precision ag programs or site specific management calibration of yield monitors is critical we know that map errors but we were talking about quality at the end of the last session quality is what all those services want they need to be able to filter or get some of that erroneous data out and use that to make some information back or generate information for the farmer to help them grow in their precision ag program thank you John one thing I thought of as you were talking operators if you got a good operator he's probably worth more than you're paying him and this is one way to document how good a job your employees are doing they say this or say that but boy you got hard proof about what's happening in the field and when we're talking about timing of operations whether that's planning or in this case we're focused on harvesting we can see even in our one example that the guy planting really influenced our field capacity because we had to go out and spray and all of a sudden we're making a lot of terms with our sprayer making a lot of terms with our harvester and that had a profound influence on how much we're making in that area of the field just that one little decision you know these maps are like I got the christie book who done it what happened I mean we got you got a dead spot somebody died who did it how can we fix that and so hey thank you John it's been a good lesson and hope we'll tune in next time