Any experienced farmer knows that you will not find the same story in two places when looking at farmland. This means that the variation you have in soil quality or even fertility can be different even within a patch of land and one stop solutions like applying the same amount of fertiliser to a patch of land may not be the best solution. Rather, understanding this variability can better help you understand the factors required to boost the productivity of your land.

Why field zonation?

With more and more farmers opting for precision-based agriculture, it becomes important to understand exactly how much investment farms require. This also has environmental implications and for example, discourages against overuse of fertiliser. We at DynaCrop are painfully aware of this scenario as the Czech Republic struggled with maintaining surface water quality during the 1990s because of significant effluent discharge from polluting industries and municipalities. The Labe (Elbe) river has faced significant nitrate contamination, believed to have been contributed by agricultural activity.

In these settings, the use of field zonation is also helpful in regulating the amount of fertiliser that should be applied to a field. Too much fertiliser can affect other nutrients in the soil, while too little could lead to barren patches. The bottom line is that precision is essential for the judicious use of resources, and field zonation is one method to achieve this.

How does it work?

As previously mentioned, field zonation can help you determine what kind of treatment is required for a piece of land. We can render the information on a field for whatever parameter, i.e. soil, moisture, leaf area index, and can present a visual representation of it overlaid on the field’s boundaries. For example, in the screenshot, the render is for normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) for a particular piece of land. As seen in the image, the NDVI value is represented using five different colours ranging from green to orange to red. This means that the NDVI value varies across the field and is representative of the different zones that exist on the patch of land.
This type of imagery helps identify zones where the crop quality is dense vs areas where it is struggling to grow. The reasons behind this can differ based on soil quality, pH balance, and even the amount of fertiliser that needs to be applied. Zoning helps in identifying exactly which inputs are required. With reference to the image above, we might have to pay more attention to the red and orange areas than the green and bright green regions on the map. This will also help you in determining the overall yield quality of the farm.

Zoning can be combined with our other products to determine immediate or long term conditions in a field. For example, tracing the change in soil fertility quality over several years presents a clearer picture of the change in fertile soil. Adding zones to it gives a better understanding of which specific areas need our most attention. Along with being environmental conscious, it helps farmers understand the exact requirements for e.g. fertilizer use over a specific cropping cycle. The precise identification of problems is not only possible on a spatial scale but also over time.