Checking the ‘Underground Weather’ For Crop Nutrition
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.
It’s common practice for farmers to consider weather conditions before applying an input on their farm. But when the plant accesses that input, be it a nutrient, chemical or biological, via the roots, it would be helpful to consider the underground weather system. Underground weather is a concept Bruce Moeller and his team at AquaSpy are trying to get more farmers to think about.
Moeller… “It’s a weather system down there. Just like you and I are breathing air and we have storms coming in, all these things we can do because we have a brain with sensors built in that we can decide what we want to do. But in the underground weather, that weather’s happening too. We don’t tend to explore it as much because the soil is dense, you can’t see it, you can’t feel it yourself. So our sensors go in and provide that for the plant.”
Moeller says getting a sense of this underground weather through AquaSpy’s technology can be a game-changer for maximizing inputs.
Moeller… “We’re answering when to put it on. If you don’t put it on at the right time, you’re gonna waste it. When you consider what people put on, especially in large farms, but even on small ones, when you’re buying fertilizer or any of the fixers, those are not cheap. These are, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars that you’re expending, and it’s a black box. You just throw it into the dirt and hope it’s okay. You don’t have to do that anymore. You can look at what the weather report is down there, and you can tell when’s the right time to do it so that you’re not wasting a third to a half to two thirds of your application.”
Learn more at aquaspy.com.
