|
| Don,
I would suggest checking out a product called FieldInsite- SAMZ which is a multi-year satellite image program that determines management zones from these images. It does not tell you what is different about each zone but is a great tool to use in conjuction with your yield and soil samples that you already have. The program uses anywhere from 5-10 images both bare soil and vegetative and looks for a correlation over a time frame to derive the management zones. It a product that you would purchase either every 2 years or 4 years dependent on the changes that are made that field or piece of ground (e.g tiling, different tillage practices)
I have used this product on about 1200 acres to generate management zones and then overlayed them onto my yield maps and soil type maps and worked with my local seed rep to determine the best variety and population in each management zone and have been very pleased with my results the last 2 years. I have ranged my population between 18,000 and 38,000 (normal being 31500). I have noticed that my poorer yielded areas in the past actually benefited from a lower population and I have been able to raise my average by 5 bu/ac in those areas. And my high yielding areas have benefited from a higher population and I have seen an increase of anywhere from 3-16 bu/ac in these areas.
Here is the link to the FieldInSite homepage, if you click on the SAMZ map in the middle of the page it will pull up an example.
http://www.fieldinsite.com/Forms/Index.aspx
A place to start anyways to learn more about any kind of patterns that are occuring in your fields other than yield maps.
Greg
Edited by catgps 2/5/2007 12:53
| |
|
Where to start
