According to Jakob van den Borne, precision farming hinges on three keywords: time, place and application.

Even before the advent of technology, farmers were able to apply these three principles of precision farming by writing down everything they did on the farm.

Jakob's great-great-grandfather wrote everything he did down in a diary, which, according to Jakob, means he too was a precision farmer.

However, the ways in which precision farmers collect, record and calibrate data has of course changed in the intervening period and precision farming, as we know it today, started around 40 years ago.

Now technologies such as GPS, remote sensing, satellite navigation, soil moisture probes and humidity sensors among others are used to collect data.

In the course of a presentation that lasted nearly one hour, Jakob, who farms with his brother in Postelsedijk, Holland, near the Belgian border, took us through the details of precision farming.

Yield potential map

The basis of precision agriculture is the yield potential map. Jakob began this process in 2007 by mapping all his fields with a drone. He is growing 140 different fields of potatoes, 10 different fields of sugar beet and around 100 different fields of maize.

The map led to the development of a smartphone application that guides Jakob and his co-workers through his fields. And, given that the farm has a four-year crop rotation, this app will help alleviate the danger that the wrong field is ploughed or seeded.

Crop registration is also a part of this app. This asks the worker what he or she is going to do in a particular field. When they leave the field, it asks the workers if they are finished and what was done.

In this way, each worker is recording his or her activity on the farm just as Jakob's great-great-grandfather did more than a century ago.

Soil sampling

The next step is soil sampling or scanning. In 2012, the two brothers invested in an electro-connectivity measurement tool (EM) which measures soil connectivity (soil moisture) levels.

He uses this soil moisture probe for harvesting his crops by analysing the map it creates of areas of low soil moisture and high soil moisture. So in a bad year when there is a lot of rain, the map created by the tool shows where there is the highest risk of bad quality potatoes.

Jakob then harvests these potatoes separately and sends them straight to the factory to minimise the damage.

After three years of gathering data on soil connectivity and comparing it to his yield, Jakob discovered a close correlation between the two. Therefore, he found he could create a yield potential map, the basis of precision agriculture, based on his soil connectivity map.

Jakob says that although people might think this is difficult, it is in fact very easy. "If we have a very dry season, the highest yield will be on the wet spots and if we have a very wet season the highest yield will be on the dry spots," he explains.

Soil compaction

Precision farming also helps to address one of the biggest global problems in agriculture: soil compaction.

This is done through controlled-traffic farming, which involves only driving over the same area all the time, so that certain areas of the fields are never touched by machines and the biological life in the soil is allowed to thrive. Controlled traffic farming has an average of 7% more yield.

Although there is special machinery for controlled-traffic farming, it costs in the region of €1.5m, so Jakob believes in a system of controlled-traffic farming using standard machinery via a GPS system. He has also made compaction maps with the technology, so he can see where the worst areas of compaction are.

Variable-rate planting

However, not everything in precision farming is an exact science. There is an element of guesswork involved when it comes to variable rate planting.

When Jakob wants to start planting his crops, he does not know what the weather is going to be like. So he takes a guess. In 2015, he guessed that the wet spot in the previous year would be the highest producer in the event of a dry year. So he planted the potatoes at 26cm in the wet spot and he planted them at 36cm in the dry spot. The average was 32cm.

He then measured all the areas every two weeks and by the middle of August 2015, he found he had a 15% higher yield in the area where the potatoes were planted at 26cm.

"So variable-rate planting based on soil connectivity really works," says Jakob, "but it is always a guess because you can never predict the weather," he adds.

Increased yield

Since precision farming methods were introduced, the potato yield on the farm has increased by 1% per year. And Jakob does not want to stop there. His goal is to double his potato yield within the next 15 years from 55t/ha to 75t/ha.

And he has outlets to do so, since around 13% of the potatoes he produces are turned into 25,000t of chips and sold to international fast food chain McDonald's and wholesaler Metro in Europe. The rest is sold as potatoes to restaurants in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Last year was a bad year price-wise for Jakob. He only received 3.5c/kg despite the fact that his growing price is 12c/kg.

"That was probably our worst year ever," he says. However, this year is looking better and he hopes to get something like 12c/kg or 13c/kg for his potatoes. "That's the free market price, we cannot control that," he says.

A passion and a hobby

So far, Jakob and his brother have spent about €500,000 of their own money on technology for precision farming, with investment averaging at about €30,000 to €35,000 per year. But he says he makes most of this back in about five years after the investment with the increased yield and better quality.

He also recycles a lot of his technology by passing the devices on to other farmers after it has been on his farm for a while.

"Then I invest in other technologies that are more updated and better suited to my current needs. Some guys have big Ferraris. I have my drones," he says. "It's all about a passion and a hobby".

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