The High-Tech Future of Farming

This MSU program is bringing drones and yield monitors to NoMi cherry farms

For thousands of years, crop-based agriculture has operated under the same fundamental framework: Plant something, care for it, and harvest its bounty.

Over time, certain practices, innovations, and implements have led to massive leaps in production. Almost all of these have involved getting more out of the land and doing it in less time. Improved output and efficiency mean more food for people who need it and more profitability for the people who work the land.

In the Grand Traverse region, researchers from Michigan State University are working on new technologies that might help cherry farmers put more money in the bank. While that’s something any farmer would appreciate, it’s especially welcome in an industry that’s feeling tremendous strain due to foreign imports, low prices, high costs, development pressure, and much more.

“Technology is everywhere, and it’s rapidly advancing. And I think the biggest challenge is getting those things implemented to a point where the farmer can say that they’re using this technology to improve the bottom line,” says Richard Price, an MSU researcher. “This is all about being profitable.”

In the Sky and on the Ground

MSU is partnering with Utah State University (Utah ranks second to Michigan in tart cherry production) to test technologies that can help farmers use data to cut costs and focus their efforts. Their work is being funded in part by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The concept is to allow farmers to hone in on which areas of their orchards are more productive than others. Most farmers with multiple orchards or orchard blocks are aware that one might be better than the next for a variety of reasons (topography, soil quality, drainage, and more) but not many are looking at productivity on a row-by-row basis.

By using yield monitors developed at USU in combination with aerial monitoring, farmers can have a much better idea of which areas of their orchards bring them the most money each year and which ones are lagging behind.

The yield monitors are attached to shakers and give direct, hard numbers of what trees produce. Quality images from drones or other high-resolution mapping sources can also yield surprisingly accurate data about productivity out in the field.

“So now, instead of saying the whole block gave me this much, farmers are now able to visualize it by tree,” Price says. “And when you isolate it on a much smaller scale, what looks like ‘average’ across the board is actually areas that are doing really well and areas that are probably not doing really well, and you can focus your resources on those areas that are making money.”

Focusing resources means more inputs (fertilizer, water, hands-on management, etc.) in the areas more likely to turn a profit and cutting back on areas that aren’t producing as well. That can mean considerable savings over a season and could indeed boost the bottom line by directing resources where they are most likely to produce profits.

“What I hear from a lot of farmers is, ‘Well, I’m going over it anyway, and why would I not farm something if I’m going to go over it anyway?’” Price says. “Well, if we can show you that so many of these trees are actually losing you money, you can either rip them out and replace them with new trees, or you just rip them for good and concentrate on less trees, and you can better manage your input costs overall.”

In situations in which trees are ripped out and not replanted, farmers can use the land for other value-added purposes like pollinator gardens.

Nikki Rothwell is the coordinator of MSU’s Northwest Michigan Horticulture Research Center in the heart of Leelanau County. She and her team have long been a resource for local farmers. She’s excited about MSU and USU’s ongoing research and says it can be coupled with other new developments for an even greater punch.

“We have other new technology like variable rate fertilizers that dispense certain amounts of fertilizer at certain times,” she says. “So if you [identify] … some kind of deficit, you know that you could potentially improve your yields by putting on different amounts of fertilizers in different areas.”

Will It Stick?

Little of this experimentation will matter, of course, unless the technology is adopted by farmers. Everyone involved is aware of that—the key will be in being able to demonstrate the value.

“None of the farmers are going to adapt to using any of these technologies unless they see the benefit from the economic side,” Price says. “There needs to be dollars and cents to it. They need to see that it’s going to save them X amount of dollars per acre.”

With that in mind, Price and other researchers hope to show how these applied technologies can directly translate to decreased costs or increased yields. The yield monitors are relatively inexpensive and could be adopted across the region within the next few years, Price says.

It might seem like a bit much to envision a farmer flying a drone around their field. But despite farmers getting a “bum rap” as it relates to their willingness to adapt to technology or other advances, Rothwell says, those sentiments belong in the past. Farmers know they have to adapt to survive, and younger generations are happily gobbling up new technologies.

“I can remember emailing growers and having them say, ‘My granddaughter is coming over this weekend. If you send me an email, she can open it.’ But we’re so far past that,” Rothwell says.
“Growers are making decisions from the seat of their tractor with their cell phones. They’re looking at models. They’re looking at data. They are definitely more ready and able to adapt than they used to be.”

Rothwell and Price say drones, which are becoming both easier to use and less expensive, can provide considerable time (and therefore cost) savings.

“Instead of huffing it up and down the rows in all of these different orchards, you could just send a flyover drone and say, ‘Okay, here you have an infestation of this bug,' or 'boy, this disease looks bad here,’” she says. “Instead of someone taking two to three hours to walk through an orchard, you could get the same information in a 20-minute drone flyover.”

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