TIFTON — A fifth-generation farmer in Calhoun County, Adam McLendon starts his days at the crack of dawn.

He looks at software logs that show his tractors’ fuel use the previous day, and whether his irrigation system is functioning efficiently. He reviews satellite imagery of his 8,500 acres of corn, cotton, peanuts and pecans, revealing which areas he needs to prioritize.

“I spend the first 45 minutes of my day, every day of the week, utilizing technology to make me a more efficient manager of our labor and our farm,” McLendon said.

Efficient management is the hallmark of modern agriculture. Scientists project that the world’s population will reach 9.7 billion by the middle of the century, and to feed all of those people, crop production will need to double in the next 30 years.

With this challenge looming, precision agriculture — the use of technology to increase the profitability, efficiency and sustainability of crop production — has become an indispensable part of farm management as growers try to maximize every acre.

The University of Georgia was among the first academic institutions to delve into precision agriculture when it emerged in the mid-1990s. A quarter-century later, UGA is stepping up efforts to expand its faculty, curriculum, research and outreach to again become a leader in the field.

“There has always been a historical willingness to adopt new technologies in agriculture. The sustainable future of Georgia agriculture will remain dependent on the creation and adoption of new technology,” said Sam Pardue, dean and director of the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “Today, we are faced with the challenge of feeding a world in which demand for food is expected to double. Feeding a growing world requires getting more yield out of each precious acre of land.”

Agriculture is Georgia’s largest industry. According to UGA’s Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development, agriculture contributes more than $73 billion to the state economy, with row and forage crops injecting more than $11.5 billion. Cotton is planted on the most acres, but Georgia ranks No. 1 in the nation in the production of peanuts, pecans and blueberries.

Suffice to say, agriculture is big business in Georgia, and UGA’s outreach around precision agriculture techniques has played a big role in the state’s agricultural expansion.

“As we’ve seen technology progress at such a rapid pace, we’ve seen the University of Georgia’s role grow … as that unbiased third party that can help some of these growers feel comfortable using these technologies and not feel like it’s being pushed on them by industry,” said Wes Porter, UGA Cooperative Extension precision agriculture and irrigation specialist.

21st century farming

From GPS guidance that accurately operates tractors planting and harvesting row crops, to soil moisture monitors and irrigation software that keep growers constantly informed about water application, precision technology has transformed modern agriculture.

“We’re all so accustomed to the technology, it would be incredibly challenging without it,” McLendon said. “Technology will never replace a farmer’s intimate knowledge of his land and his resources, but it allows us to prioritize and become better stewards of the land and our resources to be more efficient.”

Farming in the last quarter-century barely resembles what McLendon’s ancestors did.

“It is mind-blowing to see how far agriculture has progressed,” said Calvin Perry, the superintendent of UGA’s C.M. Stripling Irrigation Research Park in Camilla, Georgia. “But I think of my grandfather who was plowing behind a mule and then saw GPS auto-steer guidance on tractors in his lifetime. Putting it in that perspective, yeah, we’ve come a ways, but some folks have seen even greater change.”

A spark from two students

Back in 1995, Stuart Pocknee and Broughton Boydell were beginning their doctoral and master’s degrees, respectively, at UGA in the CAES Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. Their thesis and dissertation — “The Management of Within-Field Soil Variability” by Pocknee and “Yield Mapping of Peanut: A First Stage in the Development of Precision Farming for Peanut” by Boydell — weren’t just any grad student projects. Their studies launched UGA into the realm of precision agriculture.

They wanted to evaluate and measure the variability in fields and yields: soil properties, nutrient levels, everything that affects how a crop grows. Their professor, Craig Kvien, turned to colleagues George Vellidis (then an assistant professor) and Calvin Perry (a research engineer) for help with developing a peanut yield monitor.

“We didn’t have any tools to do that,” said Vellidis, now a professor in crop and soil sciences and director of academic programs at UGA’s Tifton campus. “That’s what got us into the research arena of precision agriculture — to try to develop these tools that would give these students the ability to do the research they wanted. And it just sort of exploded from there.

“It’s a cool twist that we got started on this because of two students who came here with ideas we hadn’t thought of yet. They helped us launch a program that is still going strong 25 years later.”

Adaption and adoption

For much of the last decade, UGA has focused on technologies that could be adopted by farmers in Georgia and the Southeast. Porter, who received the Educator/Researcher Award from the PrecisionAg Institute in 2019, became the most recent member of the UGA precision agriculture team to be nationally and internationally recognized for his work. Porter works with Georgia farmers to promote innovations that can benefit the state’s agriculture industry and make it more sustainable.

“My role is to help develop and apply research that’s been done by our scientists or in collaboration with Extension specialists, and to work with our farmers and Extension agents to get that information out to our farmers,” said Porter. “To make sure they know how to implement it and are comfortable using it on their farms.”

Some of that work includes using unmanned autonomous vehicles and multispectral cameras to develop in-season fertility recommendations for corn and cotton. Porter also studies variable-depth planting based on soil texture to increase yield. Some of that research has taken place on McLendon’s farm, which has a mix of cotton, corn and peanuts.

“We are very fortunate as growers in Georgia to have the University of Georgia,” McLendon said. “They’re an unbelievable resource for agriculture in the area. We’ve worked with them to try to have a number of acres allotted to research and development each year, and then we weed through that R&D to decide what we’re going to adapt in the commercial operation here.”

Adoption by farmers is key. When the price tag appears overwhelming, it is up to the researchers and Extension specialists to show farmers the potential benefits. Auto-steer is a perfect example of this. With a price tag approaching $25,000 per vehicle, it was hard for farmers to see the break-even point. But UGA research showed that using auto-steer has big payoffs in peanut production by significantly reducing digging losses when inverting peanuts, reducing overlaps on spraying and tillage operations, and improving overall efficiency. In many cases, it has a one-year payback.

“We thought it was too expensive and farmers would probably never adopt it,” recalls Perry. “Within a few years, nearly every farmer had it on every tractor. And they often use variable-rate spraying and variable-rate fertilizer application. All of those now are accepted standards of how to do business, when early on they were pie in the sky.”

Variable-rate irrigation (VRI) hasn’t quite achieved the same adoption rates as auto-steering. UGA developed VRI technologies that have been broadly adopted by irrigation companies, but cost and complexity have limited its adoption by farmers.

“The cost factor can really add up if you’re retrofitting a very large center-pivot operation,” Perry said. “If you buy an auto-steer system for your tractor, you’re going to use that tool over every acre that you farm. But when it comes to something you add to a center-pivot irrigation system, it’s only going to be used for that system for that field. So you can’t spread that cost out over a lot of acres.”

While his operation only uses VRI on a field-by-field basis due to its cost, McLendon says irrigation management software is a critical element of his operation.

“It allows us to monitor what we’re putting out water-wise and align that with what the crop needs at any given growth stage,” he said. “Those are things we use on a day-to-day basis that really do help our bottom line and help us be more efficient managers of our time and resources. It pays for itself quickly.”

Porter, Vellidis and Perry continue to do research that shows the benefits of precision irrigation. Vellidis calls it the “missing piece of the puzzle” for farming, particularly in the Southeast.

Eye on the future

UGA is adding faculty to assist in outreach and research with designs on restoring its place as the academic leader in precision agriculture.

“I think UGA has a legacy in this area,”  said Changying “Charlie” Li, a professor of phenomics and plant robotics in the College of Engineering about UGA’s commitment to growing its faculty resources in precision agriculture. “Higher computing power, better machine-learning algorithms and more agricultural data are providing an unprecedented opportunity for precision agriculture and smart farming. A lot of issues we could not have resolved 30 years ago now are possible to address.”

Everyone involved in precision agriculture at UGA, from Tifton to Athens, believes the next 10 to 20 years will see dramatic changes in automation and robotics as farmers maximize efficiency and production to become more sustainable.

“Ultimately where we’re going will be to develop fleets of autonomous machines — that’s the direction we see over the next 20 years,” Vellidis said. “We could have these swarms of robots going plant by plant with sensors on them to detect insects or disease pressure or water stress, or to harvest cotton one boll at a time.”

Until the robots take over, McLendon is satisfied with the direction technology is moving and the many ways it’s already improved his way of life.

“You have an app on your phone you pull up [to monitor] your irrigation pivot wherever it is, and you can see where it’s pointed and how it’s watering, what the pressure is like and also receive text message alerts as to whether or not that pivot has shut down in the middle of the night,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many times, before we started utilizing that technology, that we checked pivots at 8 o’clock right before we knock off for the day and it’s watering good, and you come back at 7 the next morning and it’s about 10 yards from where you checked it. It’s still watering, wasting water, wasting energy, wasting everything — just for lack of technology monitoring.”