Montana Organic Association 17th Annual Conference and Business Meeting

This talk will explore my current Ph.D. research topic of data-intensive agriculture applied in organic systems. Recommended regional crop seeding rates have been well established across the United States, however, these seeding rates represent the average best rate to apply, and variability within even an 80-acre field is significant. Therefore it is becoming increasingly useful to determine differences in productivity across a field to determine management practices differently for each part of a field. This idea is central to data-intensive agriculture. My project aims to take the old ideas of organic farming and the new techniques of precision agriculture to close the organic-conventional yield gap. It is often said that organic production substitutes agroecosystem knowhow for inputs. Now we can employ modern technology to really understand how each agroecosystem works at appropriate time and space scales. Work has begun with various organic growers in Montana to begin using the large data sets acquired from today’s modern equipment to explore within-field variability to establish variable seeding rates specific to individual fields. Preliminary data and further pursuits will be discussed.