Todd Gleason 0:05
This is the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Podcast Episode 63 Data Intent to Farm Management A Precision Agriculture Revolution on University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. Have you ever wanted to lay out field trials on your own farm, whether they be strip trials or checkerboard trials, and maybe do it across the whole of the field? Well, that second part probably would be very difficult, but not any more, because the deer farm, that's the data intensive farm management program, which uses precision agriculture technology with researchers and farmers working together to conduct these kinds of large scale trials, gathering all kinds of data, vast amounts of data, in fact, on how crop yields respond to input, application rates, field characteristics and weather. David Bullock heads up the team here on the Urbana-Champaign campus and across the United States that has been working with the DIY farm, funded by a grant from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. And I asked him to explain just exactly what it is.
David Bullock 1:17
It's a cyber infrastructure, if I can use that term. It it's something that farmers and crop consultants and researchers can use to run experiments, agronomic field trials on their own farms, not just run them, but get the data, have the data processed and get statistical get get advice from the data about how to farm. Data intensive farm management. It involves using precision technology.
Farmers can create what many know and shape files that have
trial designs on them, much like data. Upload a prescription, you know, from a commercial crop consultant. Except it puts it puts the experiment in the ground. So these instead of being like a small plot trial, which is as big as, you know, a couple of basketball courts, these can be hundreds and hundreds of acres and and farmers can find out a great deal about you know, you can check I'm put in 32,000 seed per acre down. Does that seem right? All right. Well, in what years does it seem right? What's the weather? Where on the field do I need more seed? Where I'm going? I need less. We get data on that. So instead of trying to rely on some on on various small plot trials to get data which are great and have their purposes, farmers are getting data right there on their own fields. So you're getting data from the fields. You're trying to manage. And we think we're helping farmers make some good decisions and make more money.
Todd Gleason 2:53
I do want to talk about the larger scope of the diff. I'm, however, off the top of my head. Farmers are likely to ask one. Who does the data belong to and to? Can I do a strip trial? Because that's what I'm used to.
David Bullock 3:08
What data are we collecting? First of all, the data is the farmer's data. Okay? The farmers own the data. We will not sell it. We will not give it away. We will not let anybody look at it without the farmer's weight and present permission. We do reserve the right to use the data, the current data for the next several years for academic research, because we have to show that what we're doing is working. Okay, so we will use the data for academic research, but but nothing else. The data is safe. It's set in the Oracle system. So, you know, the Russians can't get at it. And we and so that's the it's the farmer's data.
What kind of data? Often lots of kinds of data. Principally, the most important thing we get is experimental data, which means we change the data of farm management. Okay. It could be nitrogen trial, right? How much nitrogen do you put in the ground? Different places. It could be a pivot by or trial. It could be a hybrid trial. It could be a seed rate trial or any any pretty much any crop that the farmer can monitor. The yield and any input at the farmer can variable rate. We can do experiments with it.
And so it's it's pretty revolutionary. I know that sounds big headed of me to say that, but I think we're this can change how agronomy is done and I think it can change the world. And again, I know that sounds pretty uppity, but I'm not the only one who thinks that we can get data from farmers, own farms, farmers own fields and help them help them know what's going on. Now, one of the things we do, you always hear about agricultural, big data, agricultural, big data. You go on the Internet and there's all kinds of pretty pictures of satellites hooking onto tractors and they're doing all sorts of site specific stuff. And then we've got all this data, all this data, all this data. Here's the thing, and this is really fundamental. If you don't change management and look at the results, you're not going to find out how to manage better. And what field trials do is they change management, they change, okay, how many soybean seeds am I going to put on? And you put different amounts on and you see what happens. You look at yield Now with that, sure you want to look at electrical conductivity. You want to use, you know, elevation topology, all this stuff you can get from satellites, all the stuff you get from droughts, all that data comes into play. But think about it. You can take as many pictures in the sky from satellites as you want. If it's taken a picture of a field where the farmer, you know, put down £200 of nitrogen around where on the field you're not going to be able to do anything to think about, well, maybe he should have put on £170. Maybe he should have put on £230, because that's not in the data. If you want to learn how to manage a farm, you have to get data that changes management, and that's what field trials are for. And there's been a great deal of excitement about agricultural big data. A lot of garbage is garbage. The defense is trying to focus on the kinds of data that farmers need to farm better. And we so we have a pretty narrow focus. We're not trying to grab every piece of data that every ever came out of a 1970s hybrid trial. Okay, We are focusing narrowly, but we're getting tons of great data and it makes sense how we're doing it. There's a tremendous amount of smoking mirrors going on in the digital ag space and the big data space, big ag data space. And what we're doing isn't smoke and mirrors. It makes a lot of sense.
Todd Gleason 7:02
There's perhaps a couple of related questions. First, is there a cost to use the program? And secondly, are farmers likely to have the equipment already in their tractor cabs in order to use the program?
David Bullock 7:15
Most Illinois farmers do, yeah, most Illinois farmers. If you've bought a combine, you know, in the past, whatever, 15 years, then you've probably got a yield monitor out there. If you bought a planter in the last 15 years, you've probably got, you know, variable rate planting abilities. You know, there are places in the countries where they're small fields, etc. and not all farmers have that. But normally most of farmers have some precision technology. Now they don't always know what they'll tell me. If I had a dollar, I got all this data. I don't know what to do with it, you know, just and yeah, you've got tons of data and you don't know what to do with it. We can help you know what to do with it. Not only that, but our system helps process the data and analyze the data and give hints and give the farmers something to talk about. The crop Consultant Why is this going on in the southwest part of the field? Is that because there's a lot of clay content. We're not trying to tell farmers do this where the experts we're trying to tell farmers, look at this, here's some data. Let's think about it. This will start a conversation. Now. Does it cost anything? No. I mean, first of all, we give farmers every farm $1,000 for dealing with my personality, basically. And but then we also compensate farmers. We can estimate pretty close. Oh, yeah, this field, it lost $800 because they did that the trial. Why? Because some of the rates were too low and some of them were too high and they lost some money. Okay, well, write a check for $800. The program we're working with is the USDA in our Natural Resources Conservation Service, and they have a program called on Farm Trials, and they want to subsidize on farm experimentation. So one of the things they want to do is make sure that we make sure farmers don't lose money doing this. It's it's of course, it takes a little flight. Of course it takes a little time. Not a lot. It's not a huge learning learning curve. This is very doable.
Todd Gleason 9:20
What's the vision for the future past the time you get through the USDA grants and such?
David Bullock 9:25
The vision for the future is to create a system. First of all, we're doing you know, we've done hundreds of trials over the past since 2016. We don't want to do hundreds of trials. We want to do tens of thousands of trials, and we want to do tens of thousands of trials every year. Okay. How do we want to do that? We want to work farmer with farmers and consultants and make it user friendly that they can design these trials, put these trials in the ground, deal with the data, get ideas from the data, and okay, how do we do that? Well, you got to come up with a user friendly atmosphere and we've got one. Anybody can go to DSM dot Farm, DIY farm, Dot Farm and look at the website and you can you can easily go in there and design your own trials and just see how it works. Send me an email and you can put the trial on the ground with the guarantee that you don't lose any money. So all you can do is get information.
It's it's you know, it's very doable. Our vision is that farmers all over the world are using this tool and it could be crop consultants using it. It could be I don't care if some big company wants to use this as part of, you know, their operation center or whatever. Fine. We're not creating a commercial product. We're trying to create a public product that lots of people can use in lots of places to learn about farming or, you know, site specifically.
Todd Gleason 10:51
Are there any notable outcomes from the DIFM to this point that you can elaborate upon?
David Bullock 10:57
Yeah, sure. I mean, some of it is farm specific. There are some fields where it's pretty clear, Oh boy, here in the low lying part of the field, you really should put more seed on if you think there's going to be some rain, you know, this kind of thing or if you don't think or it all depends. Right. So we've got many, many, many reports that go to farmers, that give them site specific advice. Sometimes in Illinois, where people got a flat, the flat and black 80, what we find is you don't need to precision, you don't need a site specific. This thing, it's pretty much uniform every place. And so do the same thing don't you Don't we use precision ag to figure out sometimes, you know, you don't really need precision agriculture for this field. It's a possibility, right? And sometimes you don't. As far as finding we're finding a lot of farmers paying too much for soybean seed consistently, especially in a little west of here, where it's a little dry,
they're basically
going to make more money if they lower their soybean seed rates. Some of that for corn seed rates, especially in like the Dakotas. Okay. We're finding that we are not going to precision agriculture our way out of the nitrogen problem. Okay. When we started out, we had hope. Look, we'll use precision agriculture and we'll find out where we can not put very much nitrogen on and where we can put a lot of nitrogen on and be okay. And that's all fine. Except the point there was that, look, this can be a win win situation because farmers, we know they're putting way too much nitrogen on. They're losing money. That's not clear at all. We've got data and it shows that, no, on average Illinois farmers, lots of farmers, they're not just piling on so much nitrogen on there that they're losing money now. I mean, sure, it could happen in any year, but in general, and nobody knew that before. Now, there was a lot of speculation. We've got the data show that's not in general, that's not happening.
Todd Gleason 12:56
Is there any information or data that you've already collected which might point to ways where nutrient loss issues could be solved?
David Bullock 13:05
Yes, there is. There are possibilities, right, of sites specifically making things better. Okay. And there's some possibility there, but it's not going to be enough. Okay. We are doing cover crops, trials. Okay. We are writing a proposal to create use our system so that farmers can be subsidized by the government to do current crop trials. Okay. So how does that work? Well, we've got the data. The farmers, of course, would allow the government to see that. Yeah, I really didn't plant these crops. So you don't have to send Inspector out all the time. And we have a really efficient way to create science on crops. Okay. And farmers could run the crop crop trials. The idea would that the government would, would give them subsidies so they don't lose a lot of money doing cover crop trials. And what, you know, all of a sudden we have we know much more about what's going on. We're not just scattershot doing this trial here, this trial here. We can have a system of thousand trials, you know, and it's all very efficient. Our system helps keep the data clean. It helps make the experiments, you know, have common protocols all around. So you can you can use the data together. I think it's revolutionary. And so part of the point is to help the our
make better policies and make things possible for farmers that weren't possible before and very excited about it. So what are we doing? Well, I've got to find more money. So far we found $9 million over since 2016. So somebody thinks it's a good idea. And I think the payoff is going to be way greater than that. I think this is a terrific public investment. And so, you know, our hope is we need we have some people who are just brilliant, you know, computer coders and and got to people who brilliantly work with farmers. And I think we'd love to just start something with a few employees that makes it possible for wonderful things to happen. So where are we going to find more money?
Todd Gleason 15:20
We have the primary agricultural input companies responded to defeat more the data intensive farm management program. These would be the chemical fertilizer and seed companies.
David Bullock 15:33
To some degree, we have flown under the radar and we have meant to fly under the radar. It's only now that we're starting to try to publicize what we're doing more.
We are getting a lot of response from co-ops and from crop consultant industry. So that's the part of the private sector that we're working with and we need to work with. Our view is that Illinois extension can probably deal with crop consultants and crop consultants can help farmers. There's just not enough extension agents around. And that's not the right maybe not the right, you know, paradigm anymore. The idea is that we can use a lot of computers and work with the private industry whose job is already to give farmers advice, you know, to make these things happen. So that's our goal. If any big company wants to talk with us now, we are talking with Microsoft. They have a whole digital AG thing going on and I think we're going to work with them. Okay. So there some of that.
We are not in talks with John Deere. All these things are happy to talk to anybody. Want to talk? Okay. We're not
we're trying to give a public that. I'm 63 years old. You know, we're not trying to start a business. We're trying to create something for the public.
Todd Gleason 16:56
How quickly do you need people to sign up and can farmers still be involved for this season?
David Bullock 17:00
Yeah, farmers can be involved this year. You want to work with us? Give me an email we'll get. But even if you don't want to work quite that quickly, if you're going to do this address, if you don't do some side dressing, you ain't got time. You can either go to die from that farm and see what you got. You can email me. DSB, you ll0c at Illinois that you and we'll get you started. We can easily do lots of trials
this spring.
Todd Gleason 17:33
David Bullock is an agricultural economist here on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. If you'd like to make contact with him to learn more about the deer farm that stands for Data Intensive Farm Management Program. You can do so by visiting the Difm website. That's D i f m dot Farm, DIY fm dot Farm and then hit team and you'll find both David's phone number and his email address. The Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension and produced in association with Rachel Currie and Nicole have her back. I'm Extinctions Todd Gleason.