Benefits of Variable Rate Seed

The trouble I have is if you make your system to complicated there is a lot to go wrong if you take your eye of the ball. Keeping everything fairly simple is easer to monitor and when it goes wrong it isn't so dramatic.
We took over a share farming agreement a few years back where one of the big Contracting companies (who no longer exist) were doing everything very high tec. Micro nutrients etc. But the one thing they hadn't done in the nine years they where there was to put any lime on. 600t it took me to put it right in year one. Basic building block! Law of the minimum and all that. Sorry rant over.

Zero benefit here regarding even crop establishment. I can’t see me doing it again. It also took me a lot of time doing the vr maps then couldn’t remember how to do them the next yr as I’m not on computers much. And it just felt I was wasting to much time.

I’ve used it n the past and the crops looked much more even. I don’t think it actually cost me anything extra, the guy that does my VR ferts used to just do the files if I wanted them. I haven’t managed to get my current drill to read the files so haven’t done it for the last couple of years. Hoping to start it again this autumn.

Stuckinthemud said:

I’ve taken the plunge with VR to boost head counts particularly on flat field heavy soils. To me it’s all about ‘establishment’, SOYLS term for viable plants emerging out of winter. In my heavier parts of fields tillers are much less per plant in spring so higher seed count compensates.
I’ve had combine yield maps back from this harvest which shows more consistency of yield in middle of some of the fields. But the striking feature is field edges are lowest yield and slowly improving as you move to the middle. I guess traffic movements are a likely course and hence compaction and worse soil structure. I may trial varying seed rates to increase seed in these outer areas.

Click to expand...

With regards to field edges do you sow headlands first?

It always amazes me how many do. We've always drilled inside of field first. RIP up ends with a cultivator to take out compaction from drill turning and forklift out with seed. Then increase seedrate on headland by 20%

TWF said:

Are all you still doing this or isn't it worth the bother. We stoped doing VR fert years ago. I'm Just in the process of trying to get two drills to switch on and off seeding using Greenstar swath control . I didn't know if to bother going further if I got the drill controllers talking to the tractors OK. We run Gatekeeper and have dabbled with Soyl and the Courtyard Partnership a few years ago but gave up and went back to KISS (keep it simple stupid) with everything.

Click to expand...

I messed around with VRS for years. Having different drills made it very difficult to ensure the right plans were always available with the right machine. I think if I had one drill and did all of the drilling myself I would probably have another go. As it is we largely use untreated seed and just up the seed rate across the entire area. KISS is ideal.

Stephen E said:

If you had a 50 acre field that used to be 5 10 acre fields, previously you may have altered the seed rate between fields. VR will do this for you. In heavy areas with poorer establishment, a thin crop will not compete as well with black grass, so increasing the seed rate here will help.
The good parts will always yield more. To increase your average yield, you need to improve the poor areas.

Click to expand...

Whats wrong with looking outbof the window ,and pressing the plus minus button as your going ,when you come to knobbly or heavier bit and slacking it off in the light scaldy bits

Brisel said:

The software from the VR providers allows you to allocate a fixed tonnage of seed to a field or block of fields. No worries about logistics - you’re allocating more seed to where it would do best and saving some on the better bits.

You can also use target plant populations and can use this in advance to order the right amount of seed. If you’re going to increase rates for delays then you’re going to be short which ever way you do it.

Click to expand...

How much seed do you think you save year by doing it vari rate? Curious and Only being nosy

Lofty1984 said:

How much seed do you think you save year by doing it vari rate? Curious and Only being nosy

Click to expand...

None. The idea is to allocate any “spare” seed to poorer establishing areas to create a more homogeneous crop.

The ‘problem’ with VR Seed is its very easy to overthink and over complicate it. It doesn’t need EC / electro conductivity scans, as here they don’t correlate with satellite scans (the ‘NDVI’ scans used for making fertiliser maps) that show the thin and thick established areas in spring.

The easiest way to generate a seed map is to make a fertiliser map using the NDVI satellite images.
If you use SOYL, Rhiza or Xarvio etc for making N fertiliser maps then your 80% of the way there already. If they don’t have a facility to use NDVIs for making seed maps then just create a file called ‘seed’, choose a satellite image that shows a good representation of the good and bad bits, create a fertiliser called ‘wheat seed’ containing 100% N, and base your seed rates on your own experience. Here I increase the seed 40% on the ‘poor bits’, as only 60% of the seed will actually grow due to soil texture/ north facing slope/ slugs/ reclaimed quarry land etc.
Save the ‘fertiliser file’ to a memory card/ USB etc and load it into your variable rate seed drill. As long as the format is right (usually either Shape file or ISO XML) the seed drill won’t care that it was generated as a fert file.

If you’ve chosen the right image to base the map on then you don’t need to make a new map every year, because the good bits are usually always good, and the poor bits are usually always poor. It took me 4 years to work out that the satellite images from each individual year are 90% the same as the year before, and the year before that. I’m still using wheat seed maps based on a 2014 satellite image, I haven’t touched the map in 4 years, the USB stick hasn’t left the side of the control box, just select the old file and go.

The last ‘hack’ to make VRS ‘simple’ was to get Rhiza (our precision partner at the time) to compile all of the variable rate maps on the farm into a single ‘whole farm map’. That way we don’t have to fudge about with files when changing fields, just load up a single ‘wheat seed’ plan in mid September and keep going till we run out of fields 2 weeks later.

Brisel said:

I haven't seen it done for seed but in theory, yes. What you need to be careful of is the reasons why certain areas yield worse. Take a gravel patch and a clay patch. This year the gravel patch did much worse because it burnt off in the drought. The clay did well. Put less seed in the clay and more on the gravel. The autumn is wet and the spring too. The establishment is much better on the gravel where the seedbed is better and much worse on the knobbly wet clay. You've exaggerated the differences, not reduced them. The clay does badly but the gravel never runs out of moisture all season & goes flat yielding worse than the thin crop on the clay when you can't scrape it off the floor. Combine driver is unhappy.

Plenty of people applying P and K based on crop offtake yield maps.

IMO yield maps are a multi coloured picture of where to go and dig with a spade to see the story behind why it performed differently. There are a lot of variables & if you're drawing the wrong conclusions you can make the wrong decisions. Bad information is worse than no information.

Click to expand...

The lesson from that is what we need is far better weather forecasts

I do my own on gatekeeper
Just base it on my knowledge of the land
Zone the field up using different soil types as a scale then put a rate to each zone

Probably a stupid question, is there software that will allow me to draw my own shape file maps, got Rhiza doing a small block at the moment but I feel I could draw good maps with my knowledge of the land and the combine yield maps that I’ve got years of.

Gatekeeper

But you need to buy the module don’t you?

in the ever drive for higher yields at lower costs (relative)ive tried more or less every idea on seedrates being influenced as a younger man by laloux low seedrates schleswig holstein high seed rates and over the years of cropping our patch have long ago come to the conclusion that establishment of an even crop is the the main priority aswether the low seedrate bit yields more or less than the high seedrate bit is in the lap of the gods over the next 8months.then weed control followed by keeping pest and disease under control ,however the one thing that a lot dont consider is increasing bushel weight as a lift from 72 to 79 is a 10 %yield increase if all else is equal

db9go said:

Am i right in thinking that you use historically maps from the last harvest to drill the next is that correct

Click to expand...

No, usually the opposite as next years weather is usually different.

Matt77 said:

But you need to buy the module don’t you?

Click to expand...

Yes. The Precision Farming module, and Mapping too I think.

What do you use for displaying your yield maps?

Matt77 said:

Probably a stupid question, is there software that will allow me to draw my own shape file maps, got Rhiza doing a small block at the moment but I feel I could draw good maps with my knowledge of the land and the combine yield maps that I’ve got years of.

Click to expand...

Not tried it myself but I believe John Deere Ops Centre has the facility.