b'PRECISION AG 24/7/365MOST VIEW PRECISION AGRICULTURE AS USING CERTAIN DEVICES TO DO TASKS,BUT JACOB VAN DEN BORNE SEES IT AS A WHOLE YEAR INTEGRATED PROCESS. BY: ASHLEY ROBINSONT he majority of people think precision agriculture is a rel-atively new invention that came about a decade or so ago, however Dutch potato grower Jacob van den Borne knows that isnt the case.What is the definition of precision farming? If you Google this, you will find out that there is actually a lot of explanation my definition of precision farming is on the right time, on the right place, doing the right thing, explains van den Borne during his presentation at the virtual Canadian Spud Congress on Feb. 25. Adding this means precision farming is as old as farming itself.Van den Borne runs Van den Borne Aardappelen, an irrigated potato farm in the Netherlands and Belgium, and has spent years working on his precision ag process. Its constantly evolving work and requires him to be working all year long at different steps each seasonall designed to increase his overall crop yields.We start in the winter, the spring, the summer, and we end in the autumn. If you want to do precision farming, your basic data that you need is your yield. And, of course, we can only do yield measurement in the autumn. So, precision farming starts for me at the last yield mapping, he explains.In the winter, to kick off the cycle, van den Borne maps all of his potato fields. He works on a four-year cropping rotation where he swaps fields with other farmers meaning he doesnt farm the land every year, so his staff and himself must inspect the fields every year they use them. Geo fencing is used to keep track of the fields, an applicationJacob van den Borne, Dutch potato grower.on their phones will automatically start a crop registration as soon as they enter a field. The fields are then scanned with an EM38 device and soil conductivity is measured. To finish off the winterfarm they use variable rate planting which is based on maps of season they map AB linesthe optimal route in the field forthe shady areas in fields and soil zones.planting, spraying and harvesting.Once summer hits they start collecting data from the fields. Spring then kicks off with fertilizationvan den Borne usesAll of the equipment on the farm is equipped with sensors which livestock fertilizer as there are a lot of cattle in the area he farmsconnect to software to collect data about the fields. In any fields at. While he likes manure, he finds the one problem with it is thatwhich arent performing well, van den Borne collects more data the nutrients in it unmix when spread.for them through drones and satellites. The farms irrigation sys-To fix that we amounted an NPR sensor on our manure tank- tems also collect dataeach nozzle has a sensor mounted on it ers and we actually log what we bring in potassium and nitrogenwhich monitors irrigation rates and areas watered.and all the other important nutrients. So, we are actually able toWhen I started to have such a big data set, what I missed was make maps of how many nutrients we applied on which part ofactually the growing practiceto look at the crop, to look at the the field, van den Borne explains. plants and to actually translate that data into the real agriculture After fertilization, its then planting time. On van den Bornespolicies, van den Borne says. To fix that they now have a schedule 34IEUROPEAN SEEDIEUROPEAN-SEED.COM'