Manage your nutrient application with precision

What’s the biggest issue we’re hearing in the agricultural industry at the moment? The truth is it’s three-fold: 

  • Costs on inputs are rising – particularly on sprays, fertilizer, and seed
  • Nitrogen caps – our customers are adjusting their practice to meet caps on nutrient inputs to meet regulation
  • Productivity – improving ROI by ensuring the best yield of plant and pasture growth

Key to meeting all three of these challenges is precision nutrient management (PNM). To manage your nutrients efficiently – reduce input costs, meet environmental regulation, and increase yield – you first need some good data. 

Getting your soil nutrients measured is an important step helping you to utilise PNM strategies. A soil test will tell you where your soil has high and low nutrient load, allowing you to use variable rate application to apply your nutrients only where they’re needed. This improves your environmental footprint while ensuring your farm is reaching its maximum potential. 

High nutrient load

The areas of your paddocks that have high nutrient load already have enough nutrients to support upcoming crop or pasture growth. That means there’s no, or at least significantly reduced, need to spread fertiliser! Using a blanket rate application, you’d be spreading unneeded fertiliser, wasting money and risking a higher chance of over-application and leaching. Although it’s not required for your Farm Environmental Plan, minimising nutrient input helps your case in showing your commitment to meeting environmental regulations.

Low nutrient load

Areas of low nutrient load in your paddocks don’t have the required nutrients to support crop and pasture growth. This is a missed opportunity, as these areas aren’t reaching their full yield potential! When applying blanket rate fertiliser, these areas may not get enough nutrients – meaning they could be producing more toward your bottom line. 

Precision Nutrient Management

Employing a PNM strategy allows you to reduce nutrient application in areas with high nutrient load and increase application in areas with low nutrient load. With this precision ag data, you can ensure that each area of the paddock is getting the nutrients it needs to ensure maximum yield. This keeps you as environmentally friendly as possible while maximising your ROI. 

Most of our clients who utilise PNM pay for their soil tests in their lime savings alone – every other nutrient saving is an added bonus to your bottom line. 

On top of that, it’s helpful to have precision data to add to your FEP, showing your compliance with environmental regulation. 

Take the guesswork out of farm nutrient management and stop blanket rate application. Talk to the team at Vantage NZ today about Precision Nutrient Management.

Soil – the key to balancing profit & environmental regulation

Soil affects everything in agriculture – from seed to irrigation, fertiliser and herbicide use, to the ultimate goal of food and fibre growth. One thing we know about soil is that it’s variable – it changes from one point of your property to the next. That means knowing your soil’s unique properties across the farm is key to effectively managing your inputs and maximising profitability.  

Continue reading

Three steps for a successful harvest season

With harvest just around the corner, it’s important to have one eye on the future planning your success. In an arable farming system, this is a key time of year to maximise capturing every last grain that contributes to yield and annual performance. It’s what you strive all year for, one decision after another – to grow the best crops and maximise your performance and profitability. A crucial component of good planning is capturing your yield data so that you can track and optimise your farm’s performance. As always, there’s plenty going on in farming and with Christmas and New Year tied up with the time most arable farmers start, it’s easy to feel rushed and drop some of the important aspects of harvest setup and success.

 

Here are three key steps to ensure harvest success and maximise your yield data.

 

  1. Before harvest – make sure your combine is serviced, your displays/screens are working (and tested), your wiring looms are installed in your combine (if you’re planning on swapping GPS from one machine to another) and that last season’s yield data on your data card, memory stick or display is downloaded and saved (preferably with a backup) safely for future use. This is also an important time to set up your display with the correct paddock and crop names so that when it comes time to pull that header into the paddock, it’s good to go.
  2. During harvest – when you pull into the first paddock on day one, try to take your time. Make sure everything is set up and working correctly (GPS, moisture meters, flow meters) and that you perform some yield calibrations to get the data recorded as accurately as possible. There’s no need to get too hung up on this if final paddock weights will be available for post-processing yield data, but it’s important to make sure you will end up with accurate data to give you good insights on your yield performance. After the first paddock, we also suggest downloading and checking that the data is recording and mapping correctly.
  3. After harvest – Engage with your precision ag consultants to get the data processed as fast as possible. This ensures you maximise your decision-making time and can use your data to guide decisions for the upcoming season – eg variable rate nutrient replacement and/or variable rate seeding. This data is gold and the more years of yield data put together, the more you identify opportunities to tweak your management practices to optimise profitability across all areas of your paddock or farm.

Vantage New Zealand are your local precision ag experts, with reps located throughout New Zealand. To find out more about how we can help you maximise your yield data, call 0800 482 682 or visit https://www.vantage-nz.com/yield-mapping/

 

Season and multi-season discounts available when you book before 31st December, 2022.

How are you using your data?

Now is the ideal time for growers in our arable sector to be thinking about their yield data. But, we get it, things come up! One of the key challenges faced by our customers is finding the time to capture and use their data as things get busy leading up to harvest.  

Let’s take a dive into some of the challenges our customers face this time of year and the small steps you can take now to make the most of your harvest this season.

Doing the doing

Many of our customers find themselves caught up in the myriad of tasks there are to do on-farm and don’t find the time to plan things out. All of a sudden, another season has come and gone, business as usual! We’re too busy doing the doing out in the field to get all the tech and planning sorted ahead of time.

Overwhelm

Precision Ag technology gives us a bunch of data to work with that can be overwhelming! Even if we capture the data correctly (which we encourage you to do – good data is key!), there’s so much to look at that it’s hard to know where to start and exactly what to pull out of it.

Finding value

That’s where the nitty-gritty comes in. Knowing exactly what data to look at and how that can turn into real value for your business is key to improving your profitability. Data is gold and the truth is, the better your data the more value you have to gain from it. But you have to know where to look.

Take the first step

Improving your business, and your bottom line, is all about taking the first step. Many farmers have already paid for the tech and just need to learn how to utilise it to get more value and improve profits! We recommend all farmers take the first step by utilising their technology this season to accurately record the first year of data on-farm. Once this is captured, you can begin to harness that information to extract value, improve efficiency, and reap greater profits from your farming practices.

Information is key.

To find out more about pre-harvest training and how to make the most of your yield mapping data, get in touch!

Trimble RTX Beam Transition

Attention

There is Trimble RTX satellite beam transition happening in New Zealand, which will require you to change your frequency and baud rate on your GNSS receiver before September 30, 2021. 

This affects all GNSS receivers using CenterPoint RTX, FieldPoint RTX, RangePoint RTX, ViewPoint RTX and xFill correction services.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this change, however it allows us to continue to make enhancements to our RTX correction services. The new satellite beam, RTXPA, will be available on August 2nd, 2021 with 8 weeks of dual operational period. This means the new satellite beam will run 8 weeks in parallel with the current RTXAP satellite beam.

We encourage you to change your settings as soon as the new satellite is available using the instructions you can find at

What is changing? 
Trimble RTX is being moved to a new satellite beam, RTXPA. You will no longer receive correction data from the current RTXAP satellite (1539.8325 Mhz, 600 baud) after September 30, 2021. Please change the frequency and baud rate on your GNSS receivers to use the new RTXPA satellite (1545.2725MHz, 1200baud) as soon as possible after the second of August.

When is it happening?
The new RTXPA satellite beam will be available starting on August 2nd, 2021. The old RTXAP satellite will stop broadcasting correction data on September 30, 2021.

How will I continue to receive GNSS corrections after this change?

You need to manually input the frequency and baud rate for the RTXPA satellite beam:
● Within the Trimble RTX settings on your GNSS receiver, change the RTX satellite by manually entering the frequency and baud rate for the RTXPA satellite, shown in the table below.
● Instructions are available at trimble.com/sat Satellite Beam Frequency (MHz) Baud Rate (bps) RTXPA 1545.2725 1200

For more information:
Get in touch with any of our Vantage NZ Trimble Hardware Specialists

Russell Van de Laak: 021 874 622
Wade Riley: 021 874 602
Cam Burmeister: 027 261 0708
Shane Blampied: 027 380 5332
Daniel Magill: 027 547 4747

Or you can go directly to the Trimble Customer Care team who is standing by to help, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:

New Zealand:
Phone +64 3 354 9195
Toll Free 0800 888 864
Email nz_corrections@trimble.com 

2021 Zimmatic Trail Blazer Sustainable Irrigation Awards

The 2021 Zimmatic Trailblazer Sustainable Irrigation Awards is now on and entries are open!
 
The Awards celebrate excellence and recognises New Zealand farmers demonstrating leadership in water management and environmental stewardship. The judges are looking for steps taken to ensure sustainable water use on farm and an obvious passion for protecting one of our most precious natural resources. They had an overwhelming response from farmers last year in terms of entry numbers. This year, they would like to invite you to lend your support and help us build on this success.
 
Please help us spread the word through your own networks and encourage farmers in your area to enter themselves or nominate someone else that they think is deserving. You may even have friends or neighbours who are worthy of being nominated. If so, please put their name forward! This year’s competition is open to New Zealand farmers who irrigate more than 25ha.

The online entry and nomination process is simple, just visit the Awards website irrigationtrailblazer.com and click the red links on the home page to access the appropriate form. You can find out what impressed our judges last year in our two part leading submission summary; click here for Part 1 and Part 2. We hope this provides you with some insight into why the leading entrants from the 2020 awards caught the judging panels eye!

 

Soil Moisture Probe Site Servicing

Soil Moisture Probe Site Service

 

Servicing your soil moisture probe sites gives your telemetry the best chance at performing well – and is a service we offer! As seen below, these are common problems our technicians come across in the field; pugging, chewed cables, and blocked rain gauges. Whether you use your data to guide your decisions on farm or you simply rely on your data for auditing and compliance purposes, these issues won’t be helping your case.

Our soil moisture site service includes a rain gauge calibration, because over time being exposed to the elements, things can change. If you feel that your rain gauge data is out of line, we are more than happy to calibrate it for you. We also check over the quality of data your probe is creating to ensure that it is settled and as accurate as possible. Whilst on site, an assessment of the surroundings is taken to see whether moving the probe would be beneficial, that solar panels are facing north, no pugging has occurred, and that rain gauges aren’t blocked. An annual soil moisture report is then crafted up by one of the technicians for you to keep and reflect over for the coming months. Any further advice required will be also given.

EM Surveying – Knowledge is Power

An Electro-magnetic (EM) Survey is one of the key layers required on the precision farming journey. Precise location and understanding of soil types is a key piece of information in driving decisions around water use and nutrient placement. Not only can an EM Survey be used to reduce water inputs it can form the basis of other decisions related to plant health, production and nutrient uptake. 

An EM Survey measures two soil profiles, one measuring the variability in the top 0-50 cm of soil and the other looking at variability in the top 0-125cm of your soil profile. Following a survey customers receive a comprehensive report outlining the findings in each survey depth. Depending on the variability arising from the survey, different management zones can be created to suit the final application. These zoned maps can then be used as the basis for variable rate irrigation (VRI) variable rate fertiliser, variable rate seeding and much more. 

Figure 1. Top left is a shallow EM map and to the right of it a zoned map of that layer. Below is the same but for the deeper EM (0-125cm).

As well as collecting detailed soil information, and EM Survey also collected detailed topographic information. This data set in its own right is very useful and builds a deeper understanding of the role surface topographic changes play in water movement across the area. Coupled with the soil variability data itself this data can identify key areas for management changes to make a large difference to paddock, pasture, crop and nutrient management. 

Figure 2. Specialist precision ag software generates water movement models based on the topography data.

Another simple but effective use for EM Survey data is to use it for placing soil moisture probes based on soil variability and slope to find your optimum site within each management zone. These sites can also be used as ground-truthing sites for water-holding capacity. From these your EM map can then be converted into a water-holding capacity map

EM Surveying information can be used for a myriad of uses, not all of which we’ve covered in this article. As soil is the basis for farming the land we work with, it makes sense to ‘dig a bit deeper’ and start our precision ag journey with a deeper understanding of our soils. 

New to the Vantage portfolio is water-holding capacity assessments. These work alongide our EM Survey to aid in making more informed decisions. You can find out more about water-holding capacity assessments and what they add here. 

To understand how EM Surveying can be used in your business, reach out to the Vantage NZ team to learn more.