Towards Sustainable Agriculture
The first step in being sustainable is understanding where a farm is more productive and where a farm is less productive. An understanding of how yield varies across a farm field can be exploited to save money. The savings will be in varying the amount of ammendments required - the sustainability will be in the form of less polluted runoff.
This simple segmentation analysis provides a mapping of where the differences are.
| A centre tap irrigation field segmented into three colours | Outlines for the segmentation derived by analyzing color gradients in the soil |
The analysis also provides an inventory of high performance vs low performance areas of the farm. A quantitative knowledge of higher yield areas vs lower yield areas can give farmers an idea of the financial viability of the field.
The following maps show two existing farm fields and (to the right) a speculative farm disk. The speculative disk shows potential high (dark) and low (light) growth areas. If the investment is to be made to bring this area into production then its possible to visually get an idea of what kind of yield and performance can be expected from the new farm disk.