By Curt Wohleber
Recent repairs and upgrades at the University of Missouri Hundley-Whaley Extension and Education Center are strengthening the site’s ability to deliver high-quality research and practical education for Missouri farmers.
While many of the improvements focused on needed maintenance, the most significant impact may come from new precision agriculture tools that provide a more detailed picture of soil conditions across the center’s fields, said Shawn Deering, director of MU Hundley-Whaley Center.
“These upgrades let us do better research and provide better information to producers,” Deering said. “We’re improving the baseline so that everything we do here is more accurate and more useful.”
The improvements were supported in part by a one-time increase in state funding for MU Extension that included investments in infrastructure and capacity-building across the university’s network of extension and education centers.
Precision ag upgrades improve soil understanding
At Hundley-Whaley, that funding enabled comprehensive grid soil sampling across roughly 120 acres of research land. Rather than taking a few composite samples from large sections of a field, grid sampling divides fields into smaller units and collects soil from each one. The resulting information is used to create detailed nutrient maps showing how soil fertility varies across a field.
Source : missouri.edu