Throughout the year, we look to our Agronomists and Precision Ag Specialists for their expertise and input on providing timely and knowledgeable articles to our customers and industry leaders via our electronic newsletter. Every summer, we challenge our Interns to do the same. We award up to 5 scholarships per year for winning articles. The [...]
One of the great things about precision agriculture is that technology is constantly evolving in order to make farming more productive. Variable rate fertilization and seeding is becoming increasingly popular and continues to be adopted rapidly throughout the Great Plains. From this, a new technology has emerged and farmers in the market for a new planter [...]
To answer that question, you must look at what impacts profit. Profit = Income – Expense The equation is simple at first glance. Dig a little deeper though and growers discover ways to improve a farm’s bottom line. For example, yield influences both the income and expense side of the profit equation. That makes understanding [...]
The current commodity prices have growers everywhere going through their crop budgets with a fine-toothed comb. Finding a trusted advisor to make sure expenses are managed properly is important in this environment. With slim margins, average isn't going to cut it in 2017. It's going to take exceptional management during these difficult times to sustain [...]
When I started with Crop Quest in 2010, the term precision agriculture was only meant for the producers who were on the cutting edge of technology. In just this short amount of time the meaning of this term has changed tremendously. Now it encompasses a wide variety of tools, and is utilized by most agricultural [...]
Being from Missouri, interning with Crop Quest in Southwest Kansas was a huge change and learning experience for me, as the agriculture industry is completely different here from what I am used to! There was one thing I was all too familiar with though; water management. During my time with the Precision Ag Team, I [...]
Communication is a valuable skill that Crop Quest cultivates in our employee-owners. As a group of consultants, we deal in information. Our services are built around knowledge and sharing that knowledge. So when a new tool for communicating like SST Sirrus is revealed, we do all we can to take advantage of it. When scouting, [...]
Having an Ace up your sleeve in a card game might get your arm broke, but having one in the game of risk management might just keep you from going broke. The Ace in the game of risk management I am referring to is in-season satellite imagery. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) images from satellites [...]
Early detection is key - that’s what we are always told by doctors. After my summer internship with Crop Quest, one thing I learned is that early detection is key in agronomy as well. Within what seems like the blink of an eye, a small issue can go from hard to find to a yield [...]
“Heads or tails?” demands the referee as the coin is tossed into the air. Every football game begins with a choice, heads or tails. Profitable Precision Ag requires making a similar choice. It seems like with the flip of a coin, commodity prices are going up or coming down. Just like in football, we have [...]
It isn’t a question of why would you use precision agriculture (PA) on your farm? It’s a matter of why wouldn’t you use PA? As Craig Koehn, Crop Quest Agronomist from Montezuma, KS sees it, utilizing precision tools can potentially save time and money on most farms. In fact, precision agriculture is becoming such a [...]
Imagery, UAVs, UASs, and big data are terms that you will see in nearly every farm magazine available. These terms have become such popular topics that they are even showing up in main stream media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Most articles portray UAVs and UASs as platforms for collecting [...]
A question commonly asked when discussing Precision Ag (PA) is, “How is Precision Ag going to benefit my farm?” Benefits can take many different forms depending on the precision tool and its use, from generating more money to saving time to business advancement. Attaining any of these benefits will involve setting a goal, building a [...]
Your planter may be smarter than you think! If you were capable of dropping seeds in the field exactly where you would like them, you could expect the plants to respond in a positive way and ultimately maximize yield in that particular spot in the field. Variable rate seeding is a major step to reaching [...]
These days, combines are capable of much more than harvesting grain. They can read fields like a book. Some of the most important information a combine can collect is yield data. Yield data shows everything from the most productive portions of a field to the least and every zone in between. You have all this [...]
