Water is one of the most important inputs in agriculture, and is often the most significant factor limiting crop yield, particularly in dryland farming. Working with EMILI at Innovation Farms powered by AgExpert during the 2025 season allowed Crop Intelligence to fine-tune its Dryland Farming Ultra Package to help producers better understand their water driven yield potential (WDYP).
Dryland Farming Ultra is a hardware and software solution that allows farmers and agronomists to monitor the total available water for their crop, and use that information to make informed decisions on overall crop agronomy. Often, producers use soil tests and tissue tests and base agronomy decisions on these results. Crop Intelligence allows producers to take it one step further to measure how much can be grown based on the total amount of water available.
“I think there are a lot of assumptions in any given year about how much can be grown, but without actually measuring it, it’s impossible to know whether we’re maximizing what our true crop potential is in each season, or whether we are getting better over time,” said Brian Archibald, a territory business agronomist with Crop Intelligence.
The system uses weather stations and soil moisture probes installed between seed rows to monitor environmental conditions and soil moisture throughout the season, and is able to determine how much rain is making its way into the soil profile and how much is running off or not being captured. From there, Crop Intelligence’s software determines the water driven yield potential for that crop – the total yield potential based on water alone. This helps producers apply the 4Rs, determining the correct amount of nutrients to be applied at the right time and place.
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