(door motor whirring) (tractor cranks and rumbles) (gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) (birds chirping) (cattle mooing) (engine rumbling) (bird screeching) (gentle upbeat music continues) (engine rumbling) (children chattering) (water hissing) (geese honking) (gentle upbeat music continues) (birds chirping) - Precision agriculture in the smallest nutshell that I can put it in is giving a crop precisely what it needs precisely when it needs it.

For all of my life, all of my father's life, all of my grandfather's life, a farmers' choices have been sort of binary.

Okay, you either apply a standard amount of water to your whole field, or you don't apply any water.

You either apply a standard amount of nutrients to your whole field, or you don't apply any nutrients.

Okay, so, the farmer was required to paint his landscape with a pretty broad brush because that's the only brush that we've given him.

Okay, precision agriculture lets that farmer drill down into specific areas that he's seen his whole life.

He knows that area acts a little differently than some of the other areas.

He's able to ask very specific questions about those areas, get answers back that are quantified to map the variability in his field.

And then we are giving him tools so that he can use that variability both to his advantage financially, to the advantage of the environment, and ultimately, to all of our advantage.

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) - So today we had an agent training.

So we do agent trainings.

All of US specialists or extension specialists work to do that.

And we invite agents from across the state to come to this training to learn about specific topics.

And so they're gonna be very in depth, something that's related to what they've wanted to see, et cetera.

So the one today was specific on planter preparation and maintenance, seed metering and monitoring and then irrigation system prep and maintenance for the year.

- In my talks that I give to farmers and in production meetings and so forth is I can actually calculate money that they're actually leaving on the table by incorrectly or not being efficient with their water usage.

- We have a very big impact from precision ag in our agriculture production because, you know, of some of the things we usually say.

The big thing about precision ag is it helps us improve our efficiency, productivity, and sustainability.

And those three things right there carries a lot of range in agriculture, right?

- We have technology now that you can actually turn nozzles on and off remotely.

So if a center pivot were to cross over an area that's non-cropland, we can cut that water off in those particular areas.

And that's just being wise and using our conservation methods that we have here for us.

- So efficiency, if we're planting, seeding, spraying, stuff like that, the technology is helping us, making sure we're applying wherever we need to apply the right amount of seed, fertilizer, chemical at the right place, at the right time, all that.

So technology is making us be more efficient with our crop input.

(gentle upbeat music) - Everything that the farmer applies to his field besides his footsteps costs him money, okay.

As much as he enjoys working the land, he's just like me and you and everybody else.

At the end of the day, they have to make a little bit more money than they spent.

(gentle upbeat music) - I love farming because I grew up in agriculture.

My grandfather was a dairy farmer.

My thing is I like watching things grow.

I like putting the seed in the ground in the spring, nurturing it, fertilizing it, keeping the weeds out of it, watching it grow to a harvest.

I mean, that's a great thing.

Love operating equipment in the morning times.

It's very peaceful, just you sitting inside the tractor cab with the sun coming up, collecting your thoughts, being able to think about the day ahead.

My name is Lee Nunn.

I am a row crop farmer here in Morgan County.

I live in Bostwick, Georgia, which is in the northern part of Morgan County.

I was the Georgia Farmer of the Year in 2020.

We grow cotton, corn, soybeans, and wheat on about 1,600 acres.

Precision ag to me is the use of technology to make my farm and my farming operation tremendously more efficient.

There's lots of different precision ag.

The precision ag we use on my farm, first is the auto-steer of the tractor, which it uses the GPS receiver to receive a signal to pinpoint that tractor within four inches of its real-time location.

That allows the tractor to drive in a straight line or a curved path, whatever you choose, back and forth across the field.

And the operator does not have to have any hands on the steering wheel.

Basically that allows you to be more cognizant of the implement behind you and what you're doing and watching your crop.

And it all leads to efficiency.

- We're hands-free now.

The guidance system has the tractor.

We are planting at about four miles an hour.

And you can see this little green box right here is telling me how far I am off of the line.

So we're staying... We like to stay within a half an inch.

We're staying, you know, easily within a half an inch.

That can be a function of speed too and some of the internal settings of the guidance system.

At the end of this field, we'll be able to know how much ground we've covered.

I don't have to go to the end of this pass and turn around and coming back on the same pass.

I can go out somewhere in the field, make nice easy turns instead of having to make really sharp turns.

If I run out of seed in the middle of the field, I don't have to leave and wonder where I stop.

That's gonna tell me.

- One of the driving factors for the Southeast to adopt is the line of precision technologies, particularly on the satellite guidance systems and auto-steer technology, has been peanut production.

Peanut is a crop that produces its fruit or the nut below the soil surface.

So to harvest that, you have to plow that plant up and invert it.

So as you can tell across this field here, there's really no way to see if you're on the correct row or not.

So if you're off even two or three inches, one to the left or the right, you can have substantial harvest loss that's in your crop.

You actually leave that nut in the dirt and not get it on top where you can mechanically harvest it.

- Being a full-time farmer on a medium-to-large scale for this part of the state, you know, when we started out in 2005 here, you know, no precision ag of any sort on any piece of equipment we had.

It cuts your efficiency by a lot.

It wouldn't allow us to work late into the night like we can now.

Yes, your equipment has lights on it, but having the precision ag to be able to actually steer the machine and go in the straight line where you can concentrate on other things in low -light conditions, that helps a lot.

- I'm not looking forward very much.

I'm looking back.

I'm paying attention to my equipment.

If I was having to physically steer the tractor myself, I would have to be focused down the field the entire time.

I would not be able to really pay attention to what was going on behind me very well.

It's also very stressful and very fatiguing to fixate and stare trying to find your row all day long.

It allows us to pay attention to what's going on behind us.

It also allows us to run, you know, some longer hours than we otherwise would.

It allows us to run late into the evening when light conditions are not very good.

Fatigue would be a very high factor late in the afternoon or late even into the night.

Satellite guidance has given us a tool that's, you know, just made this production a little less stressful, made us be more efficient.

We're gathering more of the crop that we've taken all summer to produce.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - The concept of this smart farm is that's really something connected and integrated across different sensors.

And so knowing how much water stress there is, we can actually use that information to then apply water just where it needs water, and the same with nutrients.

- Irrigation has come so far, and really and truly, I think back in my lifetime just 30 years ago, what we call a traveler or a big, gigantic end gun being pulled across a field, watering a very small amount that took extremely high pressures, lots of horsepower to pump that water out, and it was a very slow process.

- So basically what we have is a circle, a really big one, almost 1,200 feet in radius.

And let's say while it's swinging through that radius, that arc, that it has a certain plot that needs a certain volume of water.

Say it's cotton, and on the far end, they got corn.

Well, at their different growth stages, they require different volumes of water, whether it be half an inch to eighth of an inch to two inches at some points.

So each week, weeks after planting, I have to change the prescription or alter it.

Say I wanna water this area right here, which is where we put our sweet corn for this year.

I'll select the percentage of whatever I set the speed and flow rate to.

So let's just say 100%, and I'll highlight it like that.

After I get this programmed, I take the flash drive out, and I go to the center point where the computer is on the tower.

And I have to plug it in, plug the flash drive in, and I go into the program and upload the file that I save right here that this has created and execute that file.

(gentle upbeat music) - Everything that we've talked about so far is pointless if you can't get this into the ground.

That's the farmer's hopes and dreams right there.

If you can't get that into the ground at the right population, properly spaced, at the right depth, at the right time, none of the rest of this matters 'cause you're not gonna have a crop worth fooling with, okay.

That's pretty important.

- This is the technology part right here, the display, right?

If we didn't have this, right, and let's say we have a seed meter on a planter, and we're planting out in the field.

And if we have any issues or problems with the seed meter, we're only gonna find out those issues or problems when the seed actually comes up and it's a plant at that point, right?

And we can't do anything at that point.

That's what we gotta live with, that, through the season, and harvest that.

So where the technology helps us is we have those sensors on actually on the planter, and this is the very same exact display technology that we have on our planters today that is telling us what is our planter doing back there.

And if something is not how we want it to be, we can actually stop and make adjustments as needed, right, to make sure that our planter is tuned in, and it's working perfectly fine.

So there are some sensors on here that are measuring, that are counting the seed as they're going, right?

And that's what the feedback we're getting here.

So if I say I wanna plant 32,000 seeds, let's just say example for corn, 32,000 seeds per acre, and I have my seed meter running over here, it is actually telling me what am I actually planting.

32,000 is my target seeding rate, but am I planting 33, 34, or 30?

So we're able to take that, you know, and measure it and see, okay, is the seed meter performing as it should be?

- [Farmer] We have a display here.

The machine's display, it's actually touchscreen.

The white line there is the guidance line.

That's the line the combine is following right now.

You have a lot of different information on this monitor.

It's telling us our actual yield per acre within the spot in the field that we're in.

I've got the average yield for the entire field, the moisture of the grain, how much grain I've harvested today, and how much I've harvested in the whole field.

We can go to different screens.

It shows me all the combine settings.

All these settings are able to be changed on the go as we operate.

- It is impressive today how much technology we have in agriculture today that is helping us making or do a lot better job than we were doing five years ago or even 10 years ago.

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) (thunder rumbling) - You know, this whole issue of precision ag isn't brand-new, but now what we have is we have drones that are running off the same thing, and they can fly that drone in the same place every time.

And so they know where they are at any given point in time.

They can do the spot treatments.

I mean, the technology is growing so fast, and this is just the beginning of it.

- So this drone specifically that we use for research, it's a drone that has a camera, a sensor, that the one that we use is multi-spectral, which basically just means that it has multiple bands that we use to relate to crop vigor.

So if you think of it, your cell phone camera also has different bands.

Most of our cell phones and just regular cameras have the bands of blue, green, and red that when combined, we see our color pictures in our screens.

The drone has a camera that is similar to that.

It has more precise wavelengths of what it calls blue, green, and red.

So by merging those different bands on a multi-spectral sensor, once they give us information about how green the plant is, how much nutrients it has, and another band on the infrared giving us information of the biomass, how much there is, and also the healthiness of the biomass, by combining both of those, we can fly these sensors and have a pretty good idea of different crop vigor levels on the field.

(gentle upbeat music continues) - Like 150 years ago, right, it was kind of precision agriculture 'cause you had farms where the farmer could see all of his land.

He could see all his animals.

He could see what individual plants were doing.

He could see what individual animals were doing.

And then as, you know, the internal combustion engine came and you know, chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and herbicides came along, it enabled agriculture to scale so that one farmer could do the work of 100 in the previous generation.

We're finding out now that things like, you know, a lot of chemicals maybe is not so great to eat all your life.

Especially out West, water is is a precious resource, right?

And we don't wanna waste water if we don't have to.

And now, you know, so the question is how do we get back to attending to individual plants, individual animals, but maintaining the scale?

And the answer to that is autonomy.

Through drones or other autonomous vehicles, it's gonna enable us to really focus in, use our resources efficiently, treat all the plants with an optimal set of conditions, and get our food supply out of it maybe healthier, cheaper, faster, and more conducive to the environment than ever before.

- But we actually also have drones today that we call spray drones.

We have spray systems on it.

They can apply pesticides, you know.

And right now, we're kind of in the face of where we're researching how this technology, you know, can be utilized while we're able to use some of the best management practices so we don't have things like spray drift or maximizing efficiency, stuff like that.

You know, one of the advantage we have with the drone sprayer is because there are propellers on the top, it's providing enough propeller wash to push the material into the canopy.

So that can be utilized to our advantage to make sure that we're doing the best job at applying pesticides in some of these applications.

- You can pretty much go to Best Buy and buy a tool that is going to legitimately give you data, even from, right, a simple camera on board.

Without putting, you know, agricultural-specific sensors on board, you can still get a lot of situational awareness.

If you're a farmer, you don't wanna be like having to sift through gigabytes every morning.

You want to have a digest that reflects probably how you operate your farm, how you manage your farm.

So I think one of the real pieces of the puzzle that needs to get unlocked is how do we format that data, process it, format it, and deliver it in a way that will bring the best out of existing agricultural practice.

(gentle upbeat music) - We have three or four stations set up today.

We hope to give a really broad overview of what precision agriculture is at the 30,0000-foot level, and not only what precision agriculture can do for a farmer but the value that it can bring to people that are far removed from the farm.

And so we have a station where we're basically asking the question, why does precision agriculture matter to me?

Why does it matter to you?

- Colham Ferry is a STEM-certified school, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and math.

And through that, we brought in an agricultural focus.

So we really try to inspire our students through hands-on learning experiences.

We try to provide a lot of project-based learning where students are connecting the different content areas and also applying that into real-world situations.

- And maybe stir a little interest in the students in science, right, in technology, in the environment, and how we can put all those things together in a package that we call precision agriculture.

- Use precision technology to put the spray exactly where it needs to go and not too much and not too little.

The little yellow thing, that is called a GPS receiver.

It talks to the satellites.

So in the future, we won't have a seat or a steering wheel.

It'll be a robot that drives by itself, and we'll go home and sleep in our beds at night, and the machine will stay in the field and keep spraying and keep working.

- The Precision Ag Day allowed us to bring all of this together to connect the STEM, the coding, the technology, with the agriculture.

- I thought it was really interesting with the tractor that would irrigate and fertilize all of the crops without like actually having someone drive it and like getting to use GPS to make sure that, like, fertilizer only touched the crops, and it didn't go into other sections where there weren't any crops.

- I found it really interesting that the tractors could, like, control themselves, and how big they were.

- I learned a lot about how a lot of tractors mainly use the GPS system and sometimes can go on tracks to like be almost like autopilot so they can go on their own without needing somebody to drive them.

- Since precision agriculture is the science and, like, technology with ag, I think it's important because we need crops so we can eat.

- So as our students have learned through their STEM classes and agriculture, I think seeing that the farming technology is changing, and so this is really helping to plant the seeds of what's to come and different opportunities that our students can pursue as they continue into middle school, high school, and even beyond.

- It was really =crazy.

I mean, like it's crazy to think they can move by themselves without like having someone actually drive it.

Like that's always been a dream of like something that would happen, and now it's actually happening.

And I think it's really cool that you can use that to make everything as perfect so that we can have more crops.

(gentle upbeat music continues) - So I like to use an example to help illustrate some of the components of precision ag, and in that example, I like to describe a world-class athlete.

Think about all of the unrelated disciplines that are involved in them performing to the top of their class of athletes, exercise science, nutrition, kinesiology, mental health.

All of those unrelated disciplines come together in a focused effort to maximize the genetic potential of an individual.

We do that in precision agriculture too.

You have the classic agricultural sciences, engineering, machine learning, AI, data science, et cetera, et cetera.

And those unrelated disciplines come together in a focused effort to maximize the genetic potential of a population of plants growing in a field.

(gentle upbeat music continues) (gentle upbeat music continues) (gentle upbeat music continues) (gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Through its research and education centers throughout the state, UGA's investment in precision agriculture has become a vital resource for producers.

Learn more at caes.uga.edu/research.