Good farm plans ensure we understand our resource base – primarily our land, water and climate – and manage to make production efficient. What will a cropping farm plan look like? What should be included?
We will achieve greater efficiency by carefully monitoring our inputs and outputs, and applying just enough to get the results we want. Nutrients, water, cultivation and crop protection can be necessary inputs but we don’t want too much of a good thing. We also get efficiency by planning so each action fits properly into the mix of daily, weekly, monthly and longer term events.
The 2014 LandWISE Conference in Palmerston North will focus on the constant drive to improve performance on and off farm. Farming never has, and never should, stand still. Much on-going improvement is now linked to precision agriculture, and the timely application of intelligence. But we must still get the basics right.
LandWISE farmers are leaders in precision agriculture. Initial steps for most were GPS tractor guidance, offering immediate input efficiency gains and importantly reducing fatigue. Many farmers have stopped there. Others have leapt ahead.
Leaders are capturing increasing benefits by mixing precise positioning with automation, sensor technologies, smart software and their own ingenuity. Some hone in on precision nutrient management with detailed mapping and variable rate application. Others have become highly skilled at level surveying and land shaping to assure good drainage.
Precision agriculture is a whole shopping trolley of tools and techniques. The best options for one farmer on one farm may be quite different for another. Massey University Professor of Precision Agriculture Ian Yule describes this as “bricolage”, a French word for tinkering.
In fine arts bricolage describes the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available. Farmers tend to be excellent tinkerers. When aware of the huge choice in the precision agriculture shopping trolley, they are able to develop a unique package that best suits them and their farm system.
The LandWISE Conference provides a meeting place where opportunities and ideas can be shared and custom solutions built from what happens to be available.
Keynote speaker Rod Collins from Agri-science Queensland is an experienced research agronomist, working with growers to implement a voluntary self-assessment and planning process. He will share thoughts on Implementing Best Practice, multi-sector efforts to integrate environment and economics, and accelerating adoption of farming practices that improve catchment water quality.
On Day 1, Conference delegates can also anticipate stories from Controlled Traffic for vegetables in Tasmania, impacts of reverting from CTF to RTF in Auckland, advances in crop sensing at regional scale, and precision ag research and implementation in New Zealand and overseas. There will be updates on nutrient management, irrigation management, drainage planning, technologies and implementation, and land shaping.
On Day 2, we turn our focus to the Arawhata Catchment near Levin. With the Tararua Vegetable Growers’ Association and Horizons Regional Council, we will tour Lake Horowhenua and farms. We will look at tools that can help us improve drainage and increase production while reducing sediment and nutrient losses.
With farm plans forming the base of future management and regulation, we’ll think about what is involved. What should a cropping farm plan look like? Where might we get information to support our planning? How can precision agriculture help?
LandWISE 2014: Ever Better – farmers, land and water
21-22 May 2014
Awapuni Function Centre
Palmerston North
Many thanks to our Platinum Conference Sponsors, BASF Crop Protection and John Deere. Thanks also to Gold sponsors, Potatoes New Zealand and Process Vegetables New Zealand, Horizons Regional Council and Trimble Ag specialists, GPS Control Systems.
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