How to maximize land efficiency
Landscape management isn’t a term often applied when farmers are thinking out their acres but the future of agriculture will. No, I am not talking about the landscape management that a groundskeeper or weekend warrior would use to make appealing front yards, but instead the concept of creating functionality to maximize land use.
If tillage, rotations, crop protection products, and cover crops are considered tools-in-the-tool box for yield then landscape management would be considered the tool box. With so much on the line with volatile weather, rising operation costs, labor issues, etc. every acre needs to count. So what better way to maximize your effort than eliminate some acres?
Synergy and efficiency are the major components to having a successful business. It helps us identify opportunities and innovations to increase our margins per acre. They also help us recognize inefficiencies and inefficacy of acres and field conditions that give us low return: ruts, stuck equipment, delayed harvest, poor fertility building, low yields, just to name a few. The synergy aspect is reading a physical landscape and implementing the best applications. The field works like a system, and the efficiency part is watching that system make you a profit, and time efficient.
That is landscape management: reading the physical landscape of your farm fields to identify areas of low return and implement alternative management practices that create profitable returns.
Every farm has these areas. Digging into it deeper, average Wisconsin farms have 3-15% of farmed acres that lose money, yet often these areas get treated like the whole field. When comparing the cost of crop inputs with the actual yield results, there are acres that can show losses of $200- $300/acre. So why are we fighting these acres when modern technology or farmer intuition can be used? Pinpointing these acres, creating subfield budgets, and viewing alternative management practices can reduce risk and minimize profit loss. Alternative management solutions are as easy to implement as they are to list them off in this article: waterways, pollinator and native grass plantings, wetland restorations, precision planting, reduced tillage, cover cropping, and perennial forage plantings. Just because it isn’t “corn” or “soybeans” doesn’t mean it isn’t functional and necessary.
Much research indicates that planting small areas to prairie adjacent to soybean fields can boost soybean yield up to 20% because of native pollinator services. Additionally, many groups will financially incentivize farmers looking to plant these diverse flowers for additional revenue. Pheasants Forever Precision Agriculture & Conservation Specialist, and my friend, Scott Stipetich has analyzed this shift in revenue. “Many clients I have worked with in Wisconsin identified portions of larger fields that were losing $100300/acre annually. We redefined the field boundary and planted the marginal crop ground to pollinator friendly species. Taking advantage of some incentive programs, these marginal acres are profiting $50-100/acre, not counting the yield bump, pest control, and other ecosystem services they may be supporting the adjacent crop, water, and soil with.”
Landscape management addresses head-lands where harvest/planting equipment is staged causing severe compaction, bottoms of fields where water saturates the soil, concentrated flows of precipitation that erode fields carrying away nutrients and crop seed, fields that find stuck equipment and rutted up fields.
Encompassing all of these management tools to create a holistic approach provides the opportunity for landscape management to also provide a positive impact to the bottom line of your enterprise, but sometimes it is more than just about that: creating a lasting legacy as a steward of the land.
The Soil
Sound-Off
