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Precision Planting agronomist: no other year like 2019

A precision agriculture company agronomist says that in 32 years of farming, he has seen no other like 2019.

“We went from flood, now to drought, and we’re going to be worrying about frost on the other end,” said Jason Webster, who manages Precision Planting’s Precision Technology Institute test farm at Pontiac, Illinois. “I don’t ever remember a year like this.”

Going from too much, to too little water, however, is an opportunity to learn how to adapt to extreme weather swings, according to Webster.

“How much water do I need to put on a crop,” Webster said, in an interview with Brownfield Ag News during a field day held collaboratively with Golden Harvest. “I think with the drip irrigation that we have right behind us here, we’re using probably half the water that an overhead pivot would use, we’re doing more with less; that’s kind of what we’re focusing on.”

The data collected will ultimately help growers through similar situations, said Webster.

“Bringing farmers out and saying, ‘ok, this is where we screwed up; some of it was on purpose, others were not, it was just us being farmers out here learning, trying to do the job,’” he said. “We just take farmers out in the field and show them what we’re doing; it’s going to be a tremendous amount of learning.”