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A Coach For Your Crops
Encirca’s ‘Eyes Over Your Shoulder’ Helps Manage Crops
BETTY VALLE GEGG-NAEGER
MidAmerica Farmer Grower
DES MOINES, IOWA
Dan Uppena, DuPont Pioneer Senior Manager of Encirca Sales for the Americas, addressed the media about Encirca Services at DuPont Pioneer Media Days recently. Uppena works specifically with the Encirca Services Team. Encirca Services launched a year ago whereby his team helps farmers fine tune production by monitoring nutrients, moisture, soils, etc. to help farmers provide optimum growing conditions and ensure yields. Already, more than 1 million acres are enrolled in this service.
“Encirca services uses advanced agronomy to refine management practices and deliver more consistent profitability,” Uppena said. “Every grower has had the experience of combining a crop as they move through the field and finding certain areas of the field where the yields are disappointing and other areas of the fields where the yields are better than expected. Many times they can explain the difference or why certain things happen but more often, especially in today’s time, you can’t explain what happened. By using grower’s information, working closely with them to refine their management practices, we’ll get more answers to some of those unknowns. Encirca services are about spending enough time to do that.”
Pioneer has the ability to work with any type of equipment the grower has. With trained certified service agents that exist within the field, Pioneer works closely to customized solutions that are unique to every grower.
“For the one million acres that we work on now, our primary product is called nitrogen management,” Uppena said. “We feel we’ve tackled the toughest problem first and it’s very, very exciting to see the progress that we’ve made; and we look forward to more and more acres and more and more success stories as we work with growers in 2016.”
Uppena gave an example of some of the recent success.
“We implemented the service with a grower from Illinois, and this grower was planting corn in a field where the previous crop was soybeans,” he said. “They did a pre-season application of nitrogen with about 100 pounds of anhydrous ammonia; they followed that with 65 more pounds with their pre-emerge herbicide right after planting. So they applied 165 units of nitrogen. They also applied manure to this field, so they had a manure credit as well and typically we expect some sort of nitrogen benefit out of the soybean crop. You put all those things together and this grower had felt like he had applied an adequate amount of nitrogen for the field. Early on we expect on average about 15 inches of rain by the mid point of the growing season, but in this particular field we had gotten 20 inches of rain, five inches above normal. This grower enrolled the field in our nitrogen management service.
“We went up and took an aerial picture of the field and we identified some yellowing in the field,” he continued. “Our certified services agent ground truthed those spots and did confirm that they were due to a nitrogen shortage. So as you expect, this surprised everybody because we would normally expect to have more than enough nitrogen with the amount applied. So the grower then did an aerial application of an additional 40 pounds of urea. We went back to those same spots, took another aerial image of that field, and basically we were able to solve the nitrogen deficiency.”
Without a service like the one Pioneer offers, the farmer would have felt very comfortable with the amount of nitrogen that he had applied, but because this was monitored closely, because the nitrogen needs were measured, corrective action was taken that should result in some very dramatic yield improvements for this grower. This is but one example of the type of successes Pioneer is having with 1,500 growers across the country with this service this year.
"Our base price for the nitrogen management service is $10 per acre,” Uppena said. “There are opportunities to use our deferred pay financing with that and there is also early purchase savings if you’re willing to commit to using that service as soon as July of this year. In addition to that, we offer what we call a stand service which is about altering the seeding rates to line up with different productivity zones that exist within the field. If you’re using nitrogen you can use that service for only an additional dollar per acre.
“Then, there are two other services that we are deploying, both of which are in a beta format that we expect to release and launch shortly; one is called fertility management which allows you to use the same type of approach that we use with nitrogen with phosphorous, potassium and lime applications. That’s going to come in and we’ll announce the price of that shortly. Then we also have a water offering where we help growers put moisture probes in the ground to measure the total available water. We also give them advice on when to start and stop their irrigation to maximize the yield of the crop. Both the water service and the fertility service will be launched in the next few months.”
Many growers are interested in trying this service. One of the questions I am asked many times is “why should I start today? Maybe I’ll just wait until you guys have really perfected this thing and then I’ll come in and it’s a little bit more proven.”
“Our answer to that is the growers that have worked with us have found that their typical practices, their tried and true practices, are the ones that tend to get challenged when you start keeping score,” he said. “So our mantra is ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure.’ We feel like management improvements are what is going to unlock the next generation of yield improvements and in today’s difficult margin environment, we just can’t afford to make some of those mistakes.
“So if you can keep score, you can measure it, we feel like you can improve on the management; and this service is here at the perfect time to help you do that. We look forward to have the opportunity to talk more with you,” Uppena summed. ∆
BETTY VALLE GEGG-NAEGER: Senior Staff Writer, MidAmerica Farmer Grower
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