Variable Rate

Unless you've been under a rock, you've likely seen - or at the very least, heard about - the Dodge Ram advertisement heralding farmers during Sunday night's Super Bowl. It featured a powerful and nostalgic reading of the poem, "So God Made a Farmer," as delivered by Paul Harvey to the 1978 FFA Convention....More

Keith Alverson and his family started to variable-rate plant in the 1990s, and now find benefit with the practice on every corn acre. He, his father Ron and uncle grow corn and soybeans on rolling land near Chester, S.D. In the early 1990s, they started reducing seeding rates manually in the dry corners of pivot-irrigated fields, where yield potential is always much lower. The practice cut seed costs by 25% in unwatered sections, and was especially beneficial in dry years, Alverson says....More

In-crop optical sensing, also called canopy sensing, is boosting yields and cutting costs for Robert Goettl, his brother Jerome and nephew Justin. Their GreenSeeker crop sensing system allowed the Le Center, Minn., farmers to shift away from reliance on all fall nitrogen (N) application. For the past four years they have combined a base fall rate with variable in-season applications using a coulter cart. Yields were up 10 bu./acre or more in the drier-than-normal 2012 season....More