CLAY CENTER — To get to be a farmer, Brian Martin first has to be a decider.
What to grow. How much of it to grow. What seed to use. Where to grow it. When to plant it — both in time of day, and in time of season. How far apart (and deep) to plant it. When to treat it. How to treat it. When to harvest it. For the third-generation Kansas farmer and his wife Lori, some of these decisions — like the one they made to convert to no-till operations in the 1990s — are easier if only in that they're made once and at a bigger scale. Others are made every day and for every acre of land.
Despite his informed intuition and expertise through experience over decades of farming, making these decisions at the level of precision required by modern agriculture can be difficult. Any number of factors — all of which independently vary across hundreds of acres of farmland at Martin Farms — influence the decisions he makes as he tries to be the most efficient, cost-effective and environmentally conscious farmer he can be. But a unique partnership with Kansas State University has helped equip Martin, and farmers like him across the country and globe, with precise information and best-informed practices, so he can implement decisions to make him the most successful farmer he can be.
K-State partnership brings precision agriculture tech, techniques to local farms
Over the past 30 years, K-State researchers have partnered with local producers like Martin Farms to study, hone and implement precision agriculture techniques. It's research that has allowed Martin Farms to take each 'next step' to overcome any obstacles and become a next-generation farm, Martin said. "There are times when you feel like you are stubbing your toe, so we say, or having a problem," he said. "You just have to work through the problem to get to the next step, and that's what we've done with these farms. K-State has been on the cutting edge forever, and that's why we partner so well."
These innovations — while helpful to Martin Farms across 2,000 acres of farmland in northcentral Kansas — are real-world use-cases that also inform agriculture research, implementation and product development around the globe, said Ajay Sharda, professor of biological and agricultural engineering and director of K-State's Institute for Digital Agriculture and Advanced Analytics, or ID3A.
He has worked directly with Martin Farms since he arrived at K-State in 2014. "This partnership has been just amazing, considering that we do not have our own farmland at this scale, and these projects — which are basically with real-world, state-of-the-art technologies — are happening on field scale in active collaboration with the growers and in active discussion with the global growers," Sharda said.
On Martin's farm, Sharda and a team of interdisciplinary faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students have studied precision agriculture practices and technology. That has included advanced planters and aerial seeders that can sow seeds and nutrients at variable rates and cameras that can identify specific weeds to target in a field.
All of that work is backed by advanced sensors and data on conditions such as electrical conductivity, soil moisture and temperature and nutrient needs that give Martin and the researchers a more precise idea of field conditions, and how to use them to their advantage. There's simply no alternative to doing this kind of research on a working farm, Sharda said. "When we do these research projects on a large field scale and present these results, not only we as researchers learn things which are spatially variable, it's something where farmers can say, 'This is the kind of farm I farm,'" Sharda said.
Farming manufacturers, especially those in the realm of precision agriculture, can also use the data to better understand how effective their machines, control systems and sensors are in a real-world scenario. "This is a very holistic systems level approach, where everybody who is a stakeholder is engaged, everybody who is a stakeholder is a partner in developing the knowledge, and everybody who is a stakeholder is a partner in furthering the knowledge we create," Sharda said.
Kansas Precision Agriculture Innovations Become World Solutions
The close partnership between K-State researchers and Martin Farms was recently on full display as the capstone tour of the International Conference on Precision Agriculture, hosted this year in partnership with K-State. Hundreds of preeminent experts in precision agriculture from more than 40 countries gathered for several days in Manhattan, where they shared some of the latest research and innovation in the field.
K-State President Richard Linton thanked attendees for visiting Kansas, and he reiterated the university's commitment to crafting agriculture innovations for Kansas that can become solutions for the global community. "As we think about precision agriculture — in maximizing the outputs while minimizing the inputs and saving the valuable resource that is water — we want to be partners and we want to be global leaders," Linton told attendees at the start of the conference. "We can solve problems for Kansas, work on issues for the U.S., and be active globally as well."
Raj Khosla, founder and past-president of the International Society of Precision Agriculture, emphasized the value of the research, and how well it translates to any agricultural operation around the world — from single-digit acre plots in Asia to the relatively massive, thousand-acre farms across the American Midwest. "Precision agriculture is scale independent," said Khosla, who is also a professor and head of K-State's agronomy department. "Think about it. Never before in the history of humankind have we produced this much food on our planet."
But he challenged attendees to think about the "five Rs" of precision agriculture — the Right Input, Right Rate, Right Time, Right Place and Right Manner — in making even more monumental progress as precision agriculture technology becomes more accessible and affordable.
K-State Research Crafts Precision for Farms of the Future
As the conference wrapped with a tour of Martin Farms, Brian Martin urged attendees to take what they learned in Kansas and implement it in every corner of the world. The land was first homesteaded by his grandfather two generations ago, and when Martin took over in the 1990s, he knew he had an obligation to maintain and keep the land viable for generations to come.
That's when he first partnered with K-State, to implement and study no-till practices that could keep more nutrients in the soil and keep it from eroding in the first place. "The thing that is great about all of this is that as each step goes, we're conserving our resources more and more, and we're not having soil erosion," he said. "As you can see in my field, it's completely covered. I'm not worried at night when a big storm comes in, because I know all of that soil will still be there the next day."
As Martin continues his partnership with researchers like Ajay Sharda, he said he is excited to see each new innovation K-State is able to make in precision agriculture. Recently, Sharda said, the research team has been exploring ways to integrate artificial intelligence, or AI, in more of the farm's operations. That would afford farmers an even higher level of precision that could save them money and resources while maximizing harvests.
To be sure, farmers will still make decisions every day, like they've done for centuries. Just like the original tractors became a tool, not a replacement, for farmers, precision agriculture technology and techniques will only help agricultural producers make the best use of their resources like seeds, sprays and fertilizers. But the best resource saved may be the most precious of all — time.
"I was able to be with my children, and now my grandchildren," Martin said. "I got to my daughters' track meets and basketball games. One of the great things is that this promotes good, family environments, because dad doesn't have to always be on the tractor. He can be at home."
