Precision Agriculture

With 20 years of experience and counting, J.B. Pearl and our participating farmers have seen and continue to see the positive results from variable rate application of crop nutrients across their fields.  We believe this success starts with our grid sampling program.

What is grid sampling?

Grid sampling is an intensive site specific soil sampling scheme.  Your field boundary is mapped using GPS and then divided into equal sized blocks or grids with a soil sample being taken from the center of each grid.  At J.B. Pearl we sample on either 1.6 acre or 2.5 acre grids.  After the soil testing laboratory has processed all the samples the soil test results are downloaded into our precision agriculture software program where the results are interpolated and can then be used for creating variable rate fertilizer and lime prescriptions.

Why should I care?

No two spots are perfectly alike in your fields! There will always be some degree of variability across your fields.  Factors that contribute to this variability:

  • Old building sites and livestock facilities that are now included in cropped areas.
  • Smaller fields with different crop and fertilizer history are now combined into larger fields.
  • Irrigated vs. non-irrigated areas.
  • Different soil types have different nutrient holding capabilities.

By placing the right products, in the right places, at the right rates, we are:

  • Working to manage each individual acre to its full potential
  • Reducing excess application thus reducing the potential for run-off pollution.
  • Better managing our input costs.

Ready for the next level? Multi-layer Analysis.

Let us help you make the most of your data.  Yield monitors are fun to look at every few minutes, (seconds?) while combining but what about after harvest?  Let us clean up, print out, and go over your yield maps with you.

If you have several years of yield data, we can normalize yields (take into effect differences in yield between crops and years) or generate multi-year averages (averages yielded across several years using the same crop) to seek out consistently high or low yielding areas in your fields.  Finding these areas affords us the option of developing specific prescriptions, such as variable rate seeding, to manage these areas appropriately.

Our talented and experienced staff can help you understand and take advantage of the full potential your data has to offer.  Please contact us today to learn how to make your data start working for you!