Positioned for Success
February 13, 2012 For the most part, cotton producers tend to stick with what they know. Old production practices are passed down from generation to generation, meaning tried and true methods are retained on the farm. So it should come as no surprise to hear experts say, for the most part, precision agriculture practices have been slow to catch on among cotton growers in the United States.
But with higher prices over the past few growing seasons, more producers have had the means to experiment with precision ag practices. A recent survey conducted by Cotton Grower magazine concluded that over 60% of cotton producers in the United States use some form of precision management in their cotton production. Of those practices, variable rate fertilizer application has long been the most popular.
Now agriculture professionals believe it’s only a matter of time before the vast majority of growers are finding ways to maximize their profits through progressive precision techniques. And there’s no denying that one precision management system – Global Positioning or GPS – is the foundation for a multitude of progressive, money-saving practices.
It’s become commonplace to see GPS antennae devices atop the cabs of tractors in recent years. As some of the top researchers at Cotton Incorporated explain, it only makes sense for that trend to continue.
“The use of GPS or other guidance may be getting close to 50% adoption right now in cotton,” says Dr. Ed Barnes, Cotton Incorporated’s Director of Agricultural Research. “It’s not ‘about’ to catch to on. It has caught on.”
Barnes says the popularity of GPS has been a topic of interest at Cotton Incorporated for a while. He suspects a primary reason for its widespread adoption is its simplicity.
“It’s fairly straightforward. You press a few buttons and you’re off and running,” he says.
But Barnes points out a self-evident fact about GPS systems – they are only the gateway to a whole host of precision management practices.
Gateway Technology
“We all suspected that once people got comfortable with GPS that it would lead to other things. Growers have quickly adopted the auto-guidance features of GPS systems, but another practice that’s becoming increasingly more popular is the swath control. Those are really the tip of the iceberg of the things you can do,” Barnes says.
Barnes points to Dr. Mike Buschermohle at the University of Tennessee as someone who has done a great deal of research on the benefits of swath control technology. The idea behind the practice is to be able to control which spray tips are operable along the width of a spray-boom. In theory, for instance, swath control allows a tractor operator to turn off any spray tips that fall outside a boundary, which is demarcated via GPS technology, as he operates near the perimeter of a field. According to Dr. Buschermohle, the technology has proven to pay for itself in as little as two years.
Barnes sees another important use for GPS based swath-control systems in the coming years. As seed companies introduce herbicide-specific traits in their cotton varieties, the prospect of accidental sprays becomes more troubling. A field planted to a RoundUp Ready cotton variety, for instance, could be totally wiped out by an accidental application of the glufosinate-based herbicide Ignite.
“Other technologies are coming. Right now we’ve got Ignite and RoundUp, but 2-4,D and other technologies are coming. The risk of spraying the wrong field with the wrong thing is only going to increase,” Barnes says. “But with the same technology that’s doing swath control, if we go ahead and map the fields and say what technology is in what fields, it becomes possible to tell the sprayer ‘I’ve put in glyphosate, only turn on in a glyphosate compatible field,’” Barnes says.
“We’ve talked with producers who are really interested in that. We just need to make it simple to do.”
Barnes also points to the practice of control traffic as a “straightforward application of GPS that not enough farmers are taking advantage of.” The idea of control traffic is to always be able to reenter a field lined up precisely where the tractor exited a field, no matter the time elapse between those two events.
“We could do more to make use of this technology to make sure we only travel in certain places of a field. In the Mid-South we’re seeing some compaction issues. The use of reduced tillage has been great, but in some cases we’ve maybe gone too far, and part of the reason is that we’re not doing a good job of control traffic,” Barnes says.
In addition to there being a greater need for GPS technology, Barnes says advancements in precision technology will make it more user-friendly. Currently, growers using GPS systems must download field maps to their tractors through the use of a memory card. But precision companies are developing software that will allow growers to download those maps electronically – similar to the way computer users are able to download email messages to their home or office.
“That’s going to make life much easier,” Barnes says.
Precise Advice
Because seed placement is so vital in the cotton market, Barnes says he would advise growers who are in the market for a GPS system to take a close look at Real Time Kinematic (RTK) systems.
“That’s the most high-precision GPS. For cotton, you’re probably going to use it for planting, and in order to make sure everything works out the rest of the year, that RTK accuracy is important,” Barnes says. “I think people might cheat themselves with othe
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