 With crop production costs at record highs, you must get the most out of every bag of seed, every jug of crop production products, every tank of fuel. It's essential that you adopt precision agriculture technology to get the highest return out of the money you spend to make a crop. I'm Alabama Cooperative Extension System Specialist, Mark Hall. Our teacher is Dr. John Fulton. John is Associate Biosystems Engineering Professor and Extension Specialist at Auburn University. He's the leader of the Extension Agronomy Team. John has recently been named Alpha Eminence Scholar and the Precision Agriculture Educator of the Year. John's most important qualification is he's easy to work with, and he's an in-the-field, get-it-done guy. Dr. John Fulton, John, thank you so much for coming and telling us about precision agriculture today. I mean, it's imperative with cost or skyrocketing for farmers. A bag of corn seed, it's $500 plus. And these chemicals, I wouldn't bought a jug of fungicide to put on the trial. It was $425 for two gallons of a fungicide. And I mean, cost or to say they're skyrocketing is an understatement. They are through the roof and then. Talk to us. Mark, thanks for having me today, but I think that's the great segue into what farmers are going to have to deal with today and in the near future about managing costs. And we call that input stewardship. And how do we manage our inputs to retain our profitability, but keep ourselves in business? I mean, we're talking about farming as a business today. Anything that we can do to help them here within our extension system and reach out and give them the tools and information to better manage those inputs is going to help our Alabama farmers move forward into the future. John, I don't think we have a better tool in precision agriculture. Without a doubt, we've been at this for nearly 20 years now, the introduction of what we call now precision ag. And as we've kind of matured and we have all this technology, in some cases the technology standard on equipment and taking advantage of that. But also, as we move forward, is collecting some of this data and start to utilize that to make decisions, help them make more informed decisions is going to be important because I don't see commodity prices rebounding like we were a few years ago. But as you mentioned, when we think about seed and some of these specialty crop protection products, the trend is it's ever increasing. We're putting a lot of research and development into these technologies, seed and crop protection. And we're just going to have to manage them to our best of our ability in technology. And ultimately, some of this data is going to help us make the right decision for my business operation. Give us just the short version as a not too long of precision ag. John, let's look at your slides here. So most people, and a lot of times we've done a great job in the last 15, 20 years talking about precision ag and really relating that to technology, but it's really much more than that. It's looking at your farm business operation and looking at the system itself and really looking at the goal of trying to optimize returns to not only our inputs, as we talked about before, but preserving resources. It's ever important today to consider the environment. Now we're in the sustainability movement as we move forward and knowing how this all fits together. The technology and the data fits into all those and allows even the public to better understand how we're doing things. The public relates to technology. They understand spacing at the younger generation. And so there's more to it than just technology. How does I take this tool and really utilize it within my farming operation to make the best decisions and make sure that we're doing the right thing at the right place at the right time. Some other things that we're going to talk about during this series is it really was the early 90s, the availability of GPS that really broke out and allow precision ag to evolve. And that's what's brought us here today is the whole idea that the global positioning system being available to civilians pinpointing our position here on earth. And all of a sudden now we can put it on our equipment, our tractors and harvesters and start to do some neat things. The same technology that the garment in my car is, that you hit the home button and wherever you are to carry your home. Absolutely. The same technology. Same technologies, same technology that's in our tablets and iPads today and our smart phones. And it's allowing us to pinpoint our position but also attach data and do some things to automate machinery to drive itself as we know it today. So GPS is really the key technology that's allowed us to evolve and bring us to what we're talking about today. When we think about precision ag we really are talking about trying to manage that variability. You can see in this particular image not only an irrigated portion but also a non-irrigated or dry land portion but you can just see that there's a lot of variability. But in the terms of managing that what we're really thinking about variability is those three key aspects. Can we measure that? Can we analyze which really brings that understanding piece in and once we start to understand it or think about that how do we bring that back and start managing and that's that technology piece of being able to traverse that field and change our inputs or our rates possibly as an example to address that variability. We think also basically here in the southeast thinking about the field conditions we've got a lot of irregular shaped fields, we've got a lot of small fields, we've got some big fields, we've got variant terrain, we've got variant soil types and textures. We even moved from north to south out of Alabama and then we've got a large segment and a lot of variability in crops that would grow down here. And then all of a sudden we bring that environmental piece in and we've got conservation structures, grass waterways, buffers and how do we manage and ensure that we're not getting runoff or offsite transport of either chemicals or nutrients today. And so bringing all that together the technology is really an enabler to address these variability, infield variability that we have. We think about all these technologies this is just an example of lists that we're going to talk about but as on the forefront we're automating machine functions, anything from using guidance but today we talk about robots being in the near future. We talk about unmanned automated systems flying out there to collect data so there's a lot of technology and that automation piece is a real key so these are just some of the things that we'll talk about in this educational series but we bring that back and I kind of bring it into those really three categories that I think farmers and even crop consultants you know the first one is kind of obvious can I save you know that cost management tool but at the same time we're thinking about best management technologies how do I be most efficient not only with my machinery but my inputs and bringing that environmental sustainability aspect in into that as well but ultimately at the end of the day we've got to have some risk management tools because we know Mark is each year is a new year and as a scientist we want to have replication but it's pretty hard to replicate a growing season so every season is unique and how do we how do we manage that so when we think about production decisions loans insurance all that's blended in today and into this whole system so with that we talk about some of the savings these are really that that cost major piece about guidance we talk about very berate what it can bring automatic section control there's a lot of potential just to get those tools in place and have some immediate savings back to the farm but the unique thing is is it's just not all about savings and as we work through our surveys over the years you know the number one thing that that we've learned from our farm community is that that quality of life you know I don't have to spend 15 hours concentrating on driving that machine accurately down rows or in some cases that without rows you know I'm a little bit less tired less fatigued as an example and happier than a day and then the other thing that that you hear a lot of comment about is once I got the technology I'll never go back yeah we know that there's a lot of interest in this an example of a 2010 survey that we did among across the state with our Alabama farmers and you'll notice that in some categories there's pretty high level adoption but I think when you look at the overall there's there's a lot of interest in trying to figure out what's going to be best suited for my operation and how that's going to fit in and so we got that high level of interest and today through various programs we know about 70% of the crop land in Alabama is it's touched by some piece of technology or precision ag today so that just shows you where the future is that number is not going to decrease as we talked about in the prior slide it's just going to be the tool or a tool in the toolbox that's really going to allow us to to push forward and retain profitability and make sure Alabama ag is at the forefront not only today but into the future so with that you know we talked about GPS we're going to get into this what is GNSS we're you know it's just not GPS today but we're really focused on machine automation we're talking about using these technology to generate data which ultimately can be analyzed and brought back to the farm to help us make decisions or that farmer make decisions but it's also that stewardship part using only what's needed out there and showing the public that value of how this technology really blends in and making sure that we have safe food we have secure food but yet we're meeting the production demands out there for the world population to feed them in the future and then finally we'll leave on this but this idea of really we're starting to drive down with some of the very research and some of the technology we're starting to think about this plant by plant management that's not too far out in the future so it's exciting to me John and we used to think about square foot gardening where you'd have just every every inch you don't get the most from it well we're square foot gardening on thousands of acres of cropland that it's just what does this this area instead of going field or even acre it's by the square foot John what we're doing a eight-part course if you want to if you if you're interested in doing this you can go to www.albern.edu slash precision ag and I'll tell you how to enroll in this eight-part course on precision agriculture John you're gonna be our instructor and we'll get into a whole lot more detail on like yield monitor man that that has been a boon to my world on looking at what different practices how they yield whether spraying or varieties or anything man you can tell the difference and so if you're interested in more information on precision agriculture go to www.albern.edu slash precision ag thank you so much John anytime we can help you folks with anything we're here to serve you the Alabama Cooperative Extensive System is a wonderful organization to work for we're here to help the citizens of Alabama