By Richard Price, Jr.
Regenerative agricultural practices
Building healthy soils is one of the main goals of regenerative agriculture. Farmers who adopt regenerative management practices often aim to improve soil function, reduce input losses, and increase the resilience of their operations to challenging weather conditions. In row crop agriculture, regenerative agriculture is a systems-based approach that emphasizes practices designed to improve soil health through conservation and holistic management. These practices commonly include reduced or no-tillage, cover cropping and in some systems, the integration of livestock. A persistent challenge is quantifying the economic return with regenerative practices. Because yield gains vary each season and may not increase linearly, evaluating improvements in the system’s resilience is critical to understanding their long-term value.
Classifying yield stability zones
Not all areas of a field perform the same year after year (Table 1). By analyzing historical yield maps, precision and digital agriculture platforms can delineate management zones that reveal patterns in crop productivity within a field. Management zones are classified based on both long-term yield levels (low, medium or high) and temporal stability (stable or unstable). Yield stability maps don’t predict yields for a specific growing season, which are largely influenced by weather conditions and in-field variations. Instead, they identify persistent areas of a field that consistently perform above-average, at-average, below-average and areas where productivity fluctuates from year to year.
Source : msu.edu