8 minute read
Ag Tech At Work
Four Exciting Innovations Every Illinois Soybean Farmer Should Monitor
By Nate Birt
Soil, sunlight and water are among the fundamental building blocks of any Illinois soybean operation. Yet emerging innovations can be stacked on top of that foundation to accelerate farmers’ productivity and profitability.
To help you make sense of the rapidly changing soybean innovation landscape, Illinois Field & Bean interviewed four ag experts spanning Azotic Technologies, John Deere, Leaftech Ag and Syngenta.
The benefits they share are wide-ranging. New and emerging tools can boost crop productivity, speed up in-field diagnostics, make crop nutrients more readily accessible to growing plants and fight disease while alleviating stress.
Block by block, these innovations can help Illinois soybean farmers construct an operation optimized for resilience and longterm success. That supports your economic viability, productivity and sustainability.
Read on to learn more about these solutions on the horizon of soybean potential. Companies are listed in alphabetical order for easy scanning.
Fill Nitrogen Gaps In High-Yield Soybeans With A Biological Solution
If you routinely push your soybean yields above 60 bu./ acre, you face a perennial challenge: supplying enough nitrogen to all those hungry plants, especially at high-demand periods and late in the season. One solution farmers increasingly include in the toolbox is a supplemental source of nitrogen to get their crop over the finish line.
Enter Envita SC, a biological solution from Azotic Technologies. Available since 2019 in the U.S., the product traces its roots to the discovery of Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus (Gd) bacteria in Brazilian sugar cane in the late 1980s, explains Jamie Zbinden, a Technical Sales Representative at Azotic based in east central Illinois. That bacteria, and subsequent research into nitrogen fixation at the University of Nottingham in England, served as building blocks for these new nitrogen options Illinois farmers can use.
“Once Envita SC is applied either in-furrow or foliar, the living Gd bacteria form vesicles within and between the plant cells,” Zbinden explains. “The bacteria continue to replicate and move throughout the plant as it grows. Air is 78 percent nitrogen, but it is not available to the plant in that form. The Gd bacteria can convert the nitrogen into a plant-available form.”
The bacteria continue to pull nitrogen from the air as long as the host plant is alive, Zbinden shares, “especially in periods of high demand when rhizobia-fixed nitrogen may not be sufficient to achieve yield potential.” That results in an average yield increase of 4 bu./acre on treated soybeans.
“Many experts see continued adoption of biologicals for the following reasons: governmental regulations, sensitive watersheds and more focus on regenerative agriculture,” Zbinden concludes. “There will be continued pressure around the globe to be better stewards of our environment.”
To learn more, visit www.azotic.com/usa.
Get Rapid Diagnostic Support Via Wireless Agronomic and Machine Data Transfer
You and your farm team probably spend very little time in a cubicle and a whole lot of time in the field. That makes accessibility to near real-time agronomic insights, machine support and field-work plans essential to get your work done. For the past decade, the John Deere Operations Center has equipped Illinois soybean farmers with these types of services, and updates roll out every two months, with new features added regularly.
“This free farm management software enables access to farm information anywhere, anytime through web, tablet or mobile,” explains Ryan Stien, John Deere Go-To-Market Manager For Digital Technologies, whose responsibilities include the Operations Center and JDLink modems. “Operations Center allows customers to see what’s happening right now in their operations and learn from their performance over time. Also, farmers can collaborate with their trusted advisers and tools to make decisions that save time, optimize yield and maximize profits.”
Among new features introduced in the past several years is Work Planner, which enables farmers to build work plans from their desktop or phone with mission-critical documentation such as field boundaries, crop varieties, guidance lines and more. They can also troubleshoot equipment on the go.
“With Remote Display Access, the local dealer can – with the customer’s permission – remotely assist with in-cab display setup and adjustments for optimal machine performance,” Stien says. “Expert Alerts is a proactive monitoring system that automatically notifies dealers, also with a customer's permission, of potential machine issues. This allows technicians to diagnose issues remotely and fix them before they become a problem.”
To learn more, visit www.deere.com.
Rapid No-Harm Tissue Sampling For Fast In-Field Nutrition Decisions
It can be a real pain to collect soybean tissue samples and check for nutrition deficiencies. Typically, your agronomist cuts into leaves, extracts samples and sends them to a lab for analysis. Then, you have to wait until the results come back. From start to finish, the process can take three to five days. Until now.
Leaftech Ag recently introduced a patented hyperspectral scanner that acts like a portable digital lab in the hands of your certified crop adviser or crop consultant. It identifies nutrient content and crop characteristics in near-real time, down to the individual soybean plant.
“We can inexpensively identify lots of data points within a field, take those data points and create target zones for further sampling or nutrient application,” explains John Mascoe, Co-founder and CEO, and an Indiana farmer with over 25 years of experience in ag tech as an agronomist and animal nutritionist. “We can get that done within the same hour of visiting that field.”
Advisers can perform three scans per minute and get nutrition results within two to three minutes, within 88 percent to 99 percent accuracy in comparison to wet-lab analysis of the same crop. Mascoe says the technology continues to improve, and he expects shorter wait times in the near future.
To capture soybean nutrition information, your adviser uses the handheld scanner that geolocates each scan that can then be imported to their own crop management software to create nutrient target zones, create a prescription and application map. This provides 30 to 100 times more data compared to a conventional tissue sample, ensuring any needed treatments are dialed in accurately to specific zones within your field.
“Because the data is georeferenced and the scan is nondestructive, we can look at the same plant multiple times throughout the growing season,” Mascoe notes. “This information can also be used to better utilize soil testing and allow the grower to be very targeted in potential treatments.”
The scanner is available to select advisers on a low-volume subscription basis in 2024, which marks the product’s third year in the field. Many more scanners are anticipated to hit the market in 2025. At the end of each growing season, advisers return the scanner for software and hardware updates. A new scanner is shipped for use the following season with a continued subscription.
“It’s about fine-tuning our knowledge with quantitative information about what actually is going on in a plant and in the genetics that we’re working with,” Mascoe says.
To learn more, visit https://leaftechag.com/.
Preserve Yield Potential Against Disease And Crop Stress
If fungicide has toppled off your stack of on-farm building blocks, it might be time to take another look. Increasingly, this input is becoming a multi-purpose tool focused on proactive yield capture rather than reactive disease management. And with an 80 percent chance of a profitable return post-treatment in any given year on some products, fungicide is worth a second look, says Tyler Harp, technical product lead for row-crop fungicides at Syngenta.
“These are not your traditional types of fungicides,” Harp explains. “I think the value that these provide is they are now a general tool for yield preservation.”
These tools include the Syngenta Plant Health or Cleaner & Greener Fungicides. Within this portfolio, products such as Miravis Neo contain a newer fungicide called Adepidyn® technology, which is a novel carboxamide fungicide with an SDHI mode of action. This can help soybean plants conserve water, leading to better water efficiency and optimal nutrient delivery throughout the growing season. Plus, it can help plants thrive amid disease stress as well as abiotic stressors such as drought or heat. In four out of five years, soybean farmers see profitable return on their investment using a Cleaner & Greener fungicide, and across all trials observed an average yield of a 6 bu./acre to 8 bu./acre average yield bump compared to untreated acres, he says.
Fungicides are returning to farmers’ radars in northern Illinois and other parts of the northern Corn Belt because of diseases such as tar spot in corn. But soybean farmers can routinely incorporate a fungicide into their suite of agronomic practices, proactively supporting plant health and yield preservation.
“Soybeans don’t get a lot of disease in northern areas, yet we’re seeing significant opportunities to preserve yield,” Harp says.
To learn more, visit BoostYourBushels.com.
Looking Ahead
As these and other new building blocks become available for your soybean operation, remember to evaluate opportunities against your farm’s business goals, existing suite of tools and sustainability priorities.
There’s little dispute that the pace of innovation is only picking up steam, offering Illinois farmers more ways to achieve success on their own terms.
