Bumper Crops
Illustration for TIME by IAN EVANS
Friday, Nov. 1, 2002
In common agricultural practice, farmers spread a uniform amount of seed, fertilizer and water over a cultivated field. But a new type of farming developed in Minnesota — called precision agriculture — uses new technologies to determine the variations of subsoils in one field. That allows farmers to modulate the amount of seed and fertilizer and water dispensed to accommodate those differences. It's a method only now catching on in Europe, but a young French company, Geocarta, has devised a system to make the practice even more precise.
Geocarta, based in Paris, developed a device that constructs a 3-dimensional computer map of a field's subsoils. To construct a map, the device, which is pulled over the field behind an all-terrain vehicle, measures the electrical resistivity of the soils at three different depths.
That's unique, says Michel Dabas, scientific director, and allows Geocarta's color maps to be imaged in 3D. Geocarta has found a correlation between soil resistivity and crop yield. The device uses several electrodes to both inject current into the soil and to measure the earth's potential to voltage, from the top root zone, to the water table below. Its software then takes resistivity data and collates it with other information, including, water content, texture, percentage of clay, stoniness and mineral content. The cartographical device also uses the global positioning system and doppler radar to obtain detailed measurements of the land. The GPS, which is a satellite navigation service, and the doppler radar work in tandem to take measurements every 10 centimeters.
The resulting map then divides the field into management zones where the amount of seed, fertilizer and irrigation can be varied. The zones change every six meters. Currently the company — which recently developed the technology at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) — is testing the system with 20 different French farmers. Farmers plug the data into their tractor's onboard computer, and a map appears on the screen.
Eventually, Geocarta expects farmers to do the measuring themselves and return the data to Geocarta, which will create the color maps and send them back via the Internet. "It will be a service-based operation," Dabas says. The system was devised mainly for wheat fields. But it can also be used in rape and barley fields, he says.
The benefits of precision farming are economic and environmental. It's economic to use only the exact amounts of seed, fertilizer and water needed to produce a crop, especially when the result is a better yield. And clearly using less chemicals and water is environmentally helpful.
Dabas, who was a CNRS researcher, says precision agriculture methods are rapidly gaining popularity most quickly in France, Germany, Britain and Scandinavia. And the company expects to have a commercial product ready within a year or two, targeting those countries. It also anticipates sales in the U.S. Should it succeed there, it's likely to sow a rich harvest of financial rewards.
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