| A Model for Sustainable Agriculture
GIS gives DuPont a better Management tool for ists Chesapeake Farms Project
By: Jesse Theodore The agricultural marketplace, which has been at the core of American society since the country's inception when 90% of the population were farmers, has never seen a more complex time.
The combination of the country's population at an all-time high with the number of farmers today at an all-time low means the pressure for greater crop output has never been higher. Yet as great as this pressure is, environmental awareness has created its own kind of marketplace pressure, one where natural resource management and wildlife habitat preservation and sustainability are of equal significance.
What does that mean for the farmer?
It means the need for greater crop output performance coupled with sound environmental practices. This new type of farming practice, known as sustainable agriculture, is changing the tools farmers are using to do their work.
One example of this new agricultural paradigm is Chesapeake Farms in the watershed of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Owned by a subsidiary of E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Co., Inc. and operated by DuPont's Agricultural Enterprise, Chesapeake Farms is employing high-tech solutions, including GIS, to boost crop production with effective environmental practices.
"GIS serves as a tool for better farm management and better communication to farmers, regulators including politicians, environmentalists, and the public at large," says Raymond Forney, formerly manager of the Chesapeake Farms Sustainable Agricultural Project. Today Forney works as a research associate for DuPont's Herbicide Discovery program. "This tool gives us a way to accurately manage and display our agricultural data." Managing Data in a Spatial Context
In 1994 DuPont began a project designed to test sustainable agriculture methods and how they could be applied to large-scale farms. The project area consists of about 100 acres out of the 3300 total acres of Chesapeake Farms and includes primarily corn, wheat, and soybean croplands.
DuPont formed the Chesapeake Farms Sustainable Agriculture Project Advisory Board (the Board), which is comprised of a dozen academic, business, government, and nonprofit organizations with a vested interest in the agricultural industry, to guide all project decisions made at Chesapeake Farms.
One of the first outlined tasks for the project was using the very best technology available to capture, store, and analyze all farm-related data. From the start, project planners recognized the value GIS would bring to this effort.
"As soon as I was tasked with this project, I knew we had to get some sort of mapping technology to meet our data management needs," says Forney. "The ability to map our data and then visually analyze it is extremely valuable to how we do business."
The Board acquired ArcView GIS to meet its technology needs and began immediately to apply the technology.
GIS is used to capture data and analyze patterns, relationships, and farming processes, including seed, fertilizer, chemical, equipment, tilling, and crop yield applications. Additional data from government and academic institutions are used as well.
"We have satellite data from NASA, soil and nutrient data from the University of Maryland, and yield data from our CASE AFS system, just to name a few," says Dorothy Jensen, GIS coordinator, Chesapeake Farms. "We use all of these data along with data we capture from our day-to-day operations."
Data capture is performed by attaching GPS units to tractors or other mobile farm equipment or by having scouts go out into the field with hand-held GPS units for conducting field surveys. Chesapeake Farms also collects data using remote sensing, where satellite pictures are taken that show precise hyperspectral images such as the locations of poor vegetation growth.
Along with farming applications, work is done to analyze the effect of these techniques on surrounding wildlife and habitat such as deer, rabbits and waterfowl. Developing GIS Applications for Sustainable Agriculture
At the heart of the Chesapeake Farms project is a 6 year evaluation development. Chesapeake Farms portioned off four separate crop areas with each area having a different set of farming techniques applied to it.
The goal is to assess how crops and the environment react differently from traditional, chemical-based agricultural practices versus more natural practices. This can provide a means to devise methods for attaining a medium ground in agriculture, one where safe farm practices result in profitable farming.
"We are 3 years into our work, and we have seen some very interesting results in that time," says Larry Gaultney, Application Technology, DuPont Agricultural Products. "Thanks in part to the use of GIS, we have been able to study a wealth of information focusing on three primary areas: economic, watershed, and leaching, or soil nutrient loss. Our findings suggest that sustainable agriculture is something that can work, but we still have more work to be done."
Chesapeake Farms is also using GIS for its wildlife research program, which studies wildlife populations and their interactions with crop production. For instance, Chesapeake Farms is currently investigating the population of white-tailed deer and their effect on crops.
"With GIS, we can see exactly how our deer population is affecting our crop production," says Mark Conner, manager, Chesapeake Farms. "Using field survey data, we can map out exactly how and where crops are affected. Before, we knew there was an impact, but measuring the impact was not feasible. This gives us an exact means for making determinations."
Chesapeake Farms can also measure and detect pest problems such as weeds, insects, and plant diseases with greater accuracy. This provides a more accurate means for countering the problem. By knowing exactly where pest problems are at their worst on the farm, Chesapeake Farms can be more judicious in its pesticide applications.
The accurate yield maps are also leading to better, more precise management. By understanding which areas of the farm are producing higher yields than others, site-specific levels of pesticide, nutrients, and fertilizer can be applied. Rather than applying the same quantity of fertilizer across a farm, it can be applied specifically as needed for a more accurate approach to farming.
"Not only are we operating more efficiently by mapping the data we collect in the field, but we also have a better means for communicating our data," says Forney. "People are visually oriented, so it makes all the difference to be able to map out data for our needs. To do this type of work any other way just wouldn't be as effective. Your eyes would glaze over if you had to view the same data in a spreadsheet."
Chesapeake Farms is also using GIS to analyze the major crop-weed interactions in the Sustainable Agriculture project, where they are analyzing four different tillage and weed control methods, to help devise productive crop management systems that are agriculturally sound.
"The work we are doing with GIS, the data collection and map output, would be much more labor intensive any other way," says Conner. "For instance, manual field survey and data output for a 50 acre plot of land takes about an hour. With GIS we can do the same data collection and output in 5 minutes. We had to build the technology base first, but once it's up and running, our life is a lot easier."
Chesapeake Farms will continue monitoring its applied site-specific techniques until the year 2000. As more and more advanced techniques are discovered, these will become available to large-scale farms for implementation.
"Technology is giving us a practical method for developing farming techniques that promise higher yields without sacrificing our rich natural resources," say Gaultney. "At the core of each of these new sustainable farming techniques is GIS technology, helping us in our very important work." About the author:
Jesse Theodore is a writer at ESRI, a GIS software and consulting firm based in Redlands, Calif. He writes about GIS-related topics for a variety of national and international publications. Back |
