Environmental Understanding from Advanced Agrilytics and Ag Ingenuity Partners.
Dr. Jon Bokmeyer, Director at Ag Ingenuity Partners
Potential can be considered something that is possible but not yet actual. The team at Advanced Agrilytics focuses on finding ways to unlock the potential of each acre. Their approach starts with understanding sub-field environments and how they impact yield, looking at the causes in the why and how.
With their research division, Ag Ingenuity Partners, they bring this understanding and research to the farm at a field level. Working with growers and partners from seed, inputs, and equipment, they can bring field level data to the trials, and give farmers actionable steps to improve soil, yields and better understand their sub-acre potential.
“We use proprietary methodology focusing on environmental attributes and their influence on foundational agronomic principles to unlock the potential of the acre,” says Dr. Jon Bokmeyer, Director at Ag Ingenuity Partners (AIP). “When we look at the sub-acre environment, we can see the yield as the outcome based on the plant’s response to each unique environment.”
Variable Rate Technology (VRT) is a way to apply the 4R’s (right rate, right place, right product, right time) to effectively manage crop inputs. Advanced Agrilytics and AIP take it a step further (or rather back) to look at the sub-acre environment in a proprietary way that gives growers ways to assign inputs, index yield data and use their VRT tools more effectively.
It’s familiar ground to cover when talking about seed and yield potential, and the soil make-up of a field. However, getting into the sub-acre environment of those fields and uncovering the yield influencing factors is where differentiation begins.
Advanced Agrilytics and AIP understand how yield influencers, or mechanisms, work together from the movement of water and nutrients to soil attributes and topography and of course product in the grower’s rotation. Using their sub-acre agronomic insight, they can provide advanced VRT recommendations to growers that account for water movement and soil nutrient needs.
This in-depth understanding has led AIP to its newly patented methodology for soybean characterization called Variety Profile Index (VPI). Historically, soybean management considerations and industry research have been focused on attributes like planting date, the use of seed treatment, and or fungicide and insecticide applications to influence yield. While all these factors may influence yield in specific environments, AIP expanded their thought process from those known contributors and looked more fundamentally at key, repeatable yield influencers specific to a variety– pod placement and branching.
“Our methodology is built upon sampling soybeans at critical times in the growing season across specific environments,” says Bokmeyer. “We’ve found that the placement of pods on a soybean plant is an informative characteristic that describes how a soybean variety builds yield that we can leverage in making variety specific placement recommendations that are repeatable.”
Using VPI provides the foundation for growers to match varieties to the growing conditions in their fields to improve yields and proactively manage input decisions throughout the growing season. This will allow growers, input, and seed providers to manage risk and maximize yields.
Want to learn how the Advanced Agrilytics and AIP teams can help? Reach out to them at https://advancedagrilytics.com/contact-us/
–Adapted from interview
