Economic benefits of variable rate technology: case studies from Australian grain farms

2009 ◽  
Vol 60 (9) ◽  
pp. 799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Robertson ◽  
Peter Carberry ◽  
Lisa Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Cropping Systems ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Capital Outlay ◽  
Variable Rate ◽  
Initial Capital ◽  
Variable Rate Technology ◽  
Wide Range

In this study we attempt to quantify the economic benefits of the adoption of variable rate application of fertiliser on six case study farms from the Australian wheatbelt. The farm case studies covered a range of agro-climatic regions (Mediterranean, uniform, and summer-dominant rainfall patterns), cropping systems (wheat–lupin, wheat–canola, and winter and summer crops), farm sizes (1250–5800 ha cropping program), soil types (shallow gravels to deep cracking clays), and production levels (average wheat yields from 1.8 to 3.5 t/ha). The farmers had been practising some form of variable rate technology (VRT) management of fertiliser for 2–10 years. Capital investment in VRT equipment ranged from $37 000 to $73 000, which is at the medium to high end of investment for Australian farmers, and when expressed as investment per cropped hectare it varied from $11 to $30/ha. All farmers were able to quantify benefits of VRT, ranging from $1 to $22/ha across the six farms, and a break-even analysis showed that the initial capital outlay was recovered within 2–5 years. On a per paddock basis, benefits ranged from –$28 to +$57/ha.year, and reasons for this wide range could be explained by fertiliser management practices and the degree of within-paddock yield variation. Where VRT benefits were able to be estimated across a run of seasons for a given paddock, it was noticeable that benefits, albeit diminished, still occurred in below-average yielding years. This suggests that, once zones have been defined, benefits from VRT will occur in most seasons. This study demonstrates that the participating Australian grain growers have adopted VRT systems that are profitable and recover the initial capital outlay within a few years. The use of, and benefits from, VRT technology vary farm to farm, in line with farmer preferences and circumstances.

scholarly journals Applying Nitrogen Site-Specifically Using Soil Electrical Conductivity Maps and Precision Agriculture Technology

2001 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 767-776 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.D. Lund ◽  
M.C. Wolcott ◽  
G.P. Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Electrical Conductivity ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Crop Yield ◽  
Soil Texture ◽  
Precision Agriculture ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
N Availability ◽  
Soil Electrical Conductivity ◽  
Variable Yield ◽  
Wide Range

Soil texture varies significantly within many agricultural fields. The physical properties of soil, such as soil texture, have a direct effect on water holding capacity, cation exchange capacity, crop yield, production capability, and nitrogen (N) loss variations within a field. In short, mobile nutrients are used, lost, and stored differently as soil textures vary. A uniform application of N to varying soils results in a wide range of N availability to the crop. N applied in excess of crop usage results in a waste of the grower’s input expense, a potential negative effect on the environment, and in some crops a reduction of crop quality, yield, and harvestability. Inadequate N levels represent a lost opportunity for crop yield and profit. The global positioning system (GPS)-referenced mapping of bulk soil electrical conductivity (EC) has been shown to serve as an effective proxy for soil texture and other soil properties. Soils with a high clay content conduct more electricity than coarser textured soils, which results in higher EC values. This paper will describe the EC mapping process and provide case studies of site-specific N applications based on EC maps. Results of these case studies suggest that N can be managed site-specifically using a variety of management practices, including soil sampling, variable yield goals, and cropping history.

Soil acidification under some tropical agricultural systems. 1. Rates of acidification and contributing factors

Soil Research ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 163 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. W. Moody ◽  
R. L. Aitken
Keyword(s):  
Soil Acidification ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Cropping Systems ◽  
Agricultural System ◽  
Agricultural Systems ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Table Grapes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Summer Crop ◽  
Winter Fallow

A paired site (developed v. undeveloped) approach was used to calculate acidification rates in several agricultural systems of tropical and subtropical Queensland. The systems considered were summer crop–winter fallow, grass or grass–legume pastures for hay production, tobacco, sugarcane, table grapes, and bananas. Mean acidification rates varied from -2·4 kmol H+ /ha · year for tobacco to 34·2 kmol H+ /ha · year for bananas. Acidification rates were higher than for comparable systems in temperate Australia. Subsurface acidification occurred under all systems, and was particularly severe under bananas despite the surface application of at least 2·5 t lime or dolomite/ha· year. As bananas can be considered to be a generic perennial horticultural system, subsurface acidification may be a widespread problem in such systems despite surface applications of amendments. There was a wide range in acidification rates within a particular agricultural system, suggesting that management practices can be manipulated to reduce acidification. As the N cycle terms were the major contributors to the acidification under cropping systems, N fertiliser management is likely to be the most critical acidification factor.

scholarly journals Contemporary Water Management Issues in Thailand in Comparative Perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 218-228
Author(s):  
Alin Chintraruck
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Disaster Mitigation ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
Management Issues

Water management is a complex and multifarious issue that joins together a wide range of different problems and approaches. Since water is essential to human life, governments must make efforts to ensure that everyone receives the water necessary but, at the same time, they have to wrestle with the fact that water is a scarce resource that must be priced for consumption under conditions of constantly increasing demand from cities, industry, agriculture and tourism. Examination of three case studies, Australia, Singapore and Japan, indicates that contemporary water management issue may be considered in a number of categories and analysis has taken place on four such categories. These are global climate change, disaster mitigation, political and legal modernization and allocation of water resources. The case studies inform the discussion of water management practices and prospects for Thailand and it is shown that the country is progressing towards the examples represented by the more developed and advanced countries insofar as it is ever possible to import a water management solution into the very specific geographical, hydrological, social, political and cultural conditions in effect in a specific location.

scholarly journals Assessing Ecosystem Services Supplied by Agroecosystems in Mediterranean Europe: A Literature Review

Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario V. Balzan ◽  
Renata Sadula ◽  
Laura Scalvenzi
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Ecosystem Service ◽  
Mediterranean Region ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Cropping Systems ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Ecosystem Structure ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mediterranean

Agricultural landscapes in the Mediterranean region may be considered as social-ecological systems that are important for biodiversity conservation whilst contributing to a wide range of ecosystem services. This literature review aims to identify the current state and biases of ecosystem service assessment in agroecosystems within the Mediterranean region, evaluate pressures impacting on agroecosystems and their services, and practices that promote ecosystem service synergies in Mediterranean agroecosystems. A total of 41 papers were selected for analysis from a set of 573 potentially relevant papers. Most of the selected papers focused on supporting, regulating and provisioning services, and mostly assessed ecosystem structure or services in the European Mediterranean context. Literature about benefits and values ascribed to by communities and stakeholders remain limited. Results presented here support the notion of multifunctional Mediterranean agroecosystems and multiple synergies were recorded in this review. Publications dealing with pressures that related to agricultural practices and demographic changes were in the majority and impact on different cropping systems. This review highlights the need to carry out integrated ecosystem service assessments that consider the multiple benefits derived from agroecosystems and which may be used to identify management practices that lead to the improvement of ecosystem services capacities and flows.

Making Better Fertiliser Decisions for Cropping Systems in Australia (BFDC): knowledge gaps and lessons learnt

2013 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 539 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. K. Conyers ◽  
M. J. Bell ◽  
N. S. Wilhelm ◽  
R. Bell ◽  
R. M. Norton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Management Practices ◽  
Cropping Systems ◽  
Critical Concentration ◽  
Relative Yield ◽  
Critical Values ◽  
National Database ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Soil Test ◽  
Critical Range ◽  
Wide Range

Soil testing remains a most valuable tool for assessing the fertiliser requirement of crops. The relationship between soil tests (generally taken from surface soil) and relative yield (RY) response to fertiliser is subject to the influence of environment (e.g. water, temperature) and management (e.g. cultivation, sowing date). As such, the degree of precision is often low when the soil test calibration is based on a wide range of independent experiments on many soil types over many years by many different operators. Hence, the 90% RY target used in soil test interpretation is best described by a critical range (critical concentration and confidence interval) for a given soil test rather than a single critical value. The present Better Fertiliser Decisions for Crops (BFDC) National Database, and the BFDC Interrogator that interacts with the database, provide a great advance over traditional formats and experiment-specific critical values because it allows the use of filters to refine the critical range for specific agronomic conditions. However, as searches become more specific (region, soil type) the quantity of data available to estimate a critical range becomes more vulnerable to data paucity, to outliers, and to clusters of localised experiments. Hence, appropriate training of the users of this database will ensure that the strengths and limitations of the BFDC National Database and BFDC Interrogator are properly understood. Additionally, the lack of standardised metadata for sites within the database makes it generally impossible to isolate the effects on critical values of the specific management or environmental factors listed earlier, which are therefore best determined by specific studies. Finally, the database is dominated (60%) by responses of wheat to nitrogen and phosphorus, meaning that relatively few studies are available for responses by pulses (other than narrow leaf lupins) or oilseeds (other than canola), especially for potassium and sulfur. Moreover, limited data are available for current cropping systems and varieties. However, the identification of these gaps can now be used to focus future research on the crops, nutrients, soils, regions, and management practices where data are lacking. The value of metadata and the need for standardised protocols for nutrition experiments were key lessons.

Nature-Based Solutions for Hydro-Meteorological Hazards: the OPERANDUM Database

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura S. Leo ◽  
Sisay Debele ◽  
Joy Ommer ◽  
Saša Vranić ◽  
Zahra Amirzada ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Climate Mitigation ◽  
Human Thermal Comfort ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Spatial Coverage ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Meteorological Hazards ◽  
Principles And Standards

<p>Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) refer to the sustainable management, protection and use of nature to preserve the ecosystem and prevent the loss of biodiversity. Given the multiple environmental, social, and economic benefits they provide to society, NBS have been increasingly promoted and implemented in cities, especially for air pollution mitigation and the improving of human thermal comfort and well-being. Several databases and web platforms already exist, which document these beneficial impacts of NBS in our cities by collecting and exposing existing NBS case studies and projects from around globe. However, the effort of cataloging and storing NBS data according to common and harmonized principles and standards seems yet sporadic and uncoordinated at the global and European level, especially in the context of natural hazard-related disasters. Nature-based solutions have been indeed recently emerged as viable and effective measures to mitigate the impacts of hydro-meteorological phenomena such as floods, landslide, etc. in both urban and rural environments, an aspect not often emphasized in the existing databases.</p><p>Driven by the ambition of overcoming these two main gaps, an innovative geo-catalogue of existing NBS has been developed within the framework of GeoIKP, the NBS web-platform newly created by the EU H2020 project OPERANDUM.</p><p>The geo-catalogue represents a comprehensive, geo-referenced, database of NBS case studies which are specifically designed to mitigate the risk and impacts of hydro-meteorological hazards, under a variety of environmental setting and hazard categories. It therefore represents a novel and open-access data source to learn about, and explore, the usability of NBS in fulfilling climate mitigation and adaptation objectives over a wide range of hydro-meteorological hazards.</p><p>Case studies collected from various resources (NBS platforms, scientific literature, technical reports, OPERANDUM living labs, etc.) are revised, classified and harmonized according to internationally recognized standard and classification schemes (e.g., INSPIRE legislation, MAES classification, etc.) which allow to characterize each NBS through a comprehensive set of parameters, including the type of hazard and ecosystem, the societal challenges and driving policies linked to it, the type of intervention and its spatial coverage, among many others.</p><p>The highly structured and comprehensive data model adopted here enables to query the database and/or filter the results based on a multitude of individual parameters which encompass all different dimensions of NBS (e.g. geophysical, societal, environmental, etc.). This not only allows for a straightforward and automatic association to one or more thematic aspects of NBS, but also enhances standardization, discoverability and interoperability of NBS data.</p>

scholarly journals Environmental Effects and Management Strategies of the Herbicides

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 518-535
Author(s):  
Sayantani Basu ◽  
◽  
Y. Vasudeva Rao ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Organic Matter ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Biological Control Agent ◽  
Cropping Systems ◽  
Evaluation Studies ◽  
Organic Matter Content ◽  
Matter Content ◽  
Management Procedure ◽  
Wide Range

India has wide range of agro-climates and soil types and highly diverse agriculture farming systems with different types of weed problems. So, herbicides are the integrated part of the general cropping systems. In general, herbicides are formulated in such a way that they degrade from the environment after completion of their intended work, but a few of them persist in the environment and cause a serious hazard to the succeeding crop and also to the surrounding environments. Hence, a proper knowledge of herbicides is important to understand the management procedure, organization and hierarchy of the herbicides. It also provides an imminent idea to herbicide resistance, which continues to be a problem in sustainable agricultural management. In this review, the herbicides used in India, negative impact of herbicides on the environment, persistency of herbicides, their dissipation methods and different management practices to avoid/minimize herbicide carry-over effects were discussed. The combine effects of bioaugmentation and biostimulation along with organic matter addition might be a promising technology to accelerate the biodegradation. Apart from these, extensive field evaluation studies with other tools like crop rotation and increment of the organic matter content is definitely a promising technique for managing the herbicide persistence. Bioherbicides, a biological control agent for weeds, and transgenic approaches can be a good alternative for chemical herbicides in future. They provide high degree of specificity of target weed and have no effect on non-target, beneficial plants or man and do not form any residues in the environment.

scholarly journals Variable Rate Technology for Florida Citrus

EDIS ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Reza Ehsani ◽  
Arnold Schumann ◽  
Masoud Salyani
Keyword(s):  
Precision Agriculture ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Variable Rate ◽  
Biological Engineering ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Variable Rate Technology ◽  
Fact Sheet ◽  
Florida Citrus ◽  
Important Site ◽  
Specific Management

AE444, a 5-page illustrated fact sheet by Reza Ehsani, Arnold Schumann, and Masoud Salyani, describes this important site-specific management component of precision agriculture which provides economic benefits to growers while reducing the application of agrochemicals. Includes references. Published by the UF Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, January 2009.

Impression management and legitimacy strategies: The BP case

2013 ◽  
pp. 35-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Michelon
Keyword(s):  
Impression Management ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Legitimacy Theory ◽  
British Petroleum ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Management Techniques ◽  
Disclosure Tone ◽  
The Empirical Analysis ◽  
A Company ◽  
Texas City

The aim of this paper is to study if and how impression management varies during different phases of the legitimation process, in particular during the legitimacy building and legitimacy repairing phases (Suchman, 1995). We aim at understanding whether and how the disclosure tone adopted by a company in the two different moments is diverse and thus functional to the intrinsic objective of the each phase. The empirical analysis focuses on the case of British Petroleum Plc. We investigated the impression management practices undertaken by the company both during the preparation of the rebranding operation, i.e. a situation in which the company is trying to build legitimacy; and during the happenings of two legitimacy crises, like the explosion of the refinery in Texas City and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The evidence appears in line with the theoretical prediction of legitimacy theory. Results show that while the company tends to privilege image enhancement techniques during the legitimacy-building phase, it uses more obfuscation techniques when managing a legitimacy-repairing process. Moreover, the analysis suggests that the company makes more extensive use of impression management techniques in the disclosures addressed to shareholders, investors and other market operators than in the disclosures addressed to the wide range of other stakeholders.

Nitrate Leaching to a Shallow Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain Aquifer as Influenced by Conventional No-Till and Low-Input Sustainable Grain Production Systems

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (3-5) ◽  
pp. 691-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. P. Craig ◽  
R. R. Weil
Keyword(s):  
Management Practices ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Cropping Systems ◽  
Cropping System ◽  
Atlantic Coastal Plain ◽  
Grain Production ◽  
Nitrogen And Phosphorus ◽  
Mineral N ◽  
Low Input ◽  
No Till

In December, 1987, the states in the Chesapeake Bay region, along with the federal government, signed an agreement which called for a 40% reduction in nitrogen and phosphorus loadings to the Bay by the year 2000. To accomplish this goal, major reductions in nutrient loadings associated with agricultural management practices were deemed necessary. The objective of this study was to determine if reducing fertilizer inputs to the NT system would result in a reduction in nitrogen contamination of groundwater. In this study, groundwater, soil, and percolate samples were collected from two cropping systems. The first system was a conventional no-till (NT) grain production system with a two-year rotation of corn/winter wheat/double crop soybean. The second system, denoted low-input sustainable agriculture (LISA), produced the same crops using a winter legume and relay-cropped soybeans into standing wheat to reduce nitrogen and herbicide inputs. Nitrate-nitrogen concentrations in groundwater were significantly lower under the LISA system. Over 80% of the NT groundwater samples had NO3-N concentrations greater than 10 mgl-1, compared to only 4% for the LISA cropping system. Significantly lower soil mineral N to a depth of 180 cm was also observed. The NT soil had nearly twice as much mineral N present in the 90-180 cm portion than the LISA cropping system.

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