It’s not so difficult to do seeding rate trials with today’s planting equipment and yield monitors, and it’s even possible to do several of these within a field in order to get an idea of how much responses vary within the field. The difficulty is that responses within parts of a field are not consistent across years: they are often more dependent on weather conditions than on soil zone or soil type.

Variable-rate seeding is a relatively new practice that is fairly easy to adopt with today’s precision farming technology.