Greenfield Technologies and the team from the University of Cordoba held a meeting last January in which the main ideas for making prescriptive maps in the pilot farm of Rabanales and the network of demonstration farms of the LIFE Innocereal EU project were put together in order to be able to apply fertilisers in a variable way, optimising economically and environmentally the cereal crop.
In this way, Greenfield Technologies will be responsible for starting the work of measuring the electrical conductivity of the soil with an electromagnetic probe towed by a quad. This measurement has been carried out in the pilot farm of Rabanales and in the demonstration farms of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Ojén and Lirón, located in the municipalities of Osuna and Lebrión.
Osuna and Lebrija, respectively.
In addition, in order to compare the soil electrical conductivity data with the phenological data of the crop, drone flights have been carried out in the different farms with a multispectral camera to analyse the NDVI. This index is correlated with the photosynthetic activity of the plants, before applying the fertiliser in the cover crop and another after approximately 20 or 30 days, depending on the climatic conditions of the area and the fertiliser applied.
The purpose of measuring soil electrical conductivity and NDVI, together with the information collected in the field notebook of the different agricultural operations carried out on the cereal crop, will be to analyse the behaviour of the crop throughout its cycle. Generating a mapping of the soil and the crop in order to elaborate a variable fertiliser distribution map optimising the next agricultural operations according to the different soil and physical characteristics of the farm, in the long and short term. Variable fertiliser distribution maps are used by farmers thanks to the machinery with which they carry out fertiliser applications by means of spreaders variable rate centrifugal spreaders and the use of tractor guidance systems.†