Providing Guidance to Kentucky Farmers for Grid and Zone Based Crop Management

Grants and Contracts Details

Description

Project research will focus on soil structure, rooting depth, and landscape features (e.g. slope, aspect, elevation) for management zone development. UKY personnel will develop management zones in partnership with farmer cooperators using all available data. Management zones delineate areas within a field allowing farmers to tailor inputs and management decisions to those areas. UKY personnel will develop zone maps using Management Zone Analyst (MZA), a free statistical software produced by the USDA-ARS (Fridgen et al., 2004), and QGIS, an open source, free GIS software available to the public (QGIS Development Team, 2009). We will also develop zone maps using commercial software packages (e.g. SMS Software by AgLeader, FarmWorks by Trimble). We will compare management zone maps generated by MZA to those generated by the commercial software packages. An extensive body of scientific papers provide transparency regarding the statistics used by MZA software to produce the management zones. Conversely, the commercial software packages rarely provide the statistical calculations occurring in the background when developing zones. Comparing the two will provide some insight into the validity of commercial software zone delineation.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date9/1/197/1/22

Funding

  • Kentucky Small Grain Growers Association: $30,000.00

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