Farmers frequently need to make challenging decisions (right decisions, right time, right place, , and right amount) that impact crop productivity, profitability, and sustainability. Making the right decision is often the difference between profit and loss. Farmers require hard numbers to allow them to rapidly make informed decisions. However, much of this information is collected through laborious manual observation, guesswork, or subjective data collection. For example, crop yield estimation can help producers, agronomists, breeders, researchers, insurance companies, policy makers, and governments to rapidly make informed management and financial decisions. Monitoring and estimating in-field crop yield in real-time is now required more frequently due to climate change. However, obtaining accurate yield estimates at the individual farm field level still rely on inaccurate, unpleasant, and time-consuming manual observation.

Timely and accurate crop yield estimation can increase a farmer’s gross revenue by 10-30%. Below are seven business scenarios.

1. Pre-sell:

Value proposition: Wheat growers can use our timely and accurate crop yield estimation and scientific statistical analysis to pre-sell crops. These pre-sells can increase on average ~$16,500 market value per 1000 wheat acres.

When planning a sale, grain companies contact railways as far as three months ahead of harvest to confirm their capacity to move the grain. It is not uncommon for wheat prices to be 10% higher (or more) outside the harvest window. Therefore, producers usually pre-sell a portion of the wheat crop prior to the fall harvest (possibly in May-July) to obtain a favorable price. Producers need to estimate the approximate crop yield in a wheat field before they can make an informed decision on how much to charge a prospective buyer. As the market price can drop any time, producers need to know the crop yield in their field within one day.

We believe that informed decision-making regarding pre-sell crops should be based on sound scientific principles and empirical data, historical prices, accepted methodologies, and professional standards. However, most farmers forward the price of a portion of their crop without employing technology and scientific analysis, relying on experience and tradition. Most farmers are reluctant to pre-sell a large portion of their crop prior to its harvest because they are unable to rapidly estimate the crop yield accurately in the fields. When the prototype of this project is complete, we will partner with agriculture companies and companies that market grain to integrate our crop yield information with other data, such as weather forecasts and global wheat production estimates. This will help Alberta wheat growers to make informed decisions such as “How many bushels of wheat should I pre-sell (forward price) prior to harvest when the price is favorable?”

The average price is historically ~10% higher than the price in the harvest window (Statistics Canada). A 10% increase of total market value for 1000 acres with 55 bushels per acre and a sell price at $10 per bushel would be $55,000 (=1000*55*10*0.1). Our technology will enable farmers to use scientific analysis to get a better-than-average return on an investment with less risk. If our technology can help farmers to manage forwarding pricing 30% of the crop, it would be $16,500.

Feedback and testimonial from our interviewed farmers about our technology.
“This ties in a bit to the yield estimation and on farm storage. A farmer who doesn’t want to invest in additional storage would normally be wise (historically) to sell predicted “overage” prior to harvest when prices typically soften (and delivery may not be an option). However, if yields are low and a producer knows the on-farm storage is adequate, they may not pre-sell at all. Knowing the yield potential week by week or day by day would help in this decision-making process.”

2. Harvesting Preparation: To plan harvest and storage requirements, delivery estimates, and capital management, wheat growers estimate the crop yield in the fields several weeks before harvesting. This is critical when a larger than normal (bumper) crop is expected. Knowing the predicted crop yield enables a producer to plan ahead in the face of an early snowfall or prolonged fall rains.

3. Fungicide application is costly, but under the right conditions, with the right timing, it can increase a crop yield by more than 30%. With SGA technology, a high-resolution growth stage map can be created for a wheat field and combined with a high-resolution estimated wheat yield map. This information tells producers where and when to apply fungicide, and to apply fungicide only to certain areas of a field, or to time application differently in separate areas of a field to increase chemical efficacy or decrease chemical use. Our technology could result in a 10% reduction in fungicide applied to Saskatchewan fields.

Producers use the following math to decide whether they should apply fungicide.

Estimated Yield (unit/acre) x Estimated Yield Savings (%) x Selling price ($/unit) minus the fungicide application cost (%/acre) = Expected Net Return ($/acre)

If the gross revenue per acre is estimated at $480 ($8/bu @ 60 bu/ac), and a fungicide application costing $28/ac is estimated to protect 10% of the gross revenue (combination of yield and quality) 8 out of 10 years, the value for the fungicide application would be $480*10%-$28 = $20/ac. However, if the yield was estimated to be 35 bu/ac instead of 60 bu/ac, the same analysis yields a value of 0. From the knowledge, if the yield throughout the field is variable, the high value areas could be protected with a fungicide application and the low value areas would be skipped. Current analysis by producers and agrologists show that up to 10% of wheat fields do not need fungicide because they are poor performing areas that don’t justify additional inputs.

4. Fertilizer application:

Variable Rate Fertilizer (VRF) Application Technologies are being adopted by producers to varying degrees within western Canada (Government of Saskatchewan). The Canadian government plans to reduce nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from synthetic fertilizer by 30% in 2030 relative to a 2020 baseline. The plans encourage producers to use VRF and 4R (right source, right rate, right time, right place) stewardship practices.

The amount of nutrients used by a crop vary with the yield. A large crop requires more nutrients than a small crop. If high crop yields and high protein are sought, high levels of nitrogen fertilizer must be applied. A high-resolution crop yield map and a soil map of a field provide the critical information to define management zones to support VRF and 4R practices.

SGA technology can automatically create high-resolution crop yield and growth stage maps on a weekly or daily basis. Combining crop yield map, growth stage Map, soil, water, and topography maps, and harvest yield maps can build “effective” variable rate fertilizer prescription maps for VRF and 4R practices. 

5. Crop insurance assessments: Hail is a major crop loss factor in the Canadian prairies, especially in Alberta. Crop hail insurance payments to Canadian prairie wheat producers totalled more than $265 million in 2022.  Insurance adjusters are still manually assessing the number of damaged stems or heads in several locations of a wheat field.

Using SGA technology, wheat producers and/or insurance adjusters simply use a smartphone or a drone to take photos of a wheat field. The images can be uploaded into SGA’s cloud platform or mobile applications to estimate the crop yield after hail damage. Comparing post-hail versus pre-hail wheat photos in the client or neighbour fields in our system or the wheat photos without hail damage, our technology and solution can make the assessment of wheat hail damage easier and more accurate for inspectors and producers. As inspector and producer are reviewing loss of yields through the same mechanism, the subjectivity is minimized and theoretically reaching consensus much quicker. Our technology can make the assessment of wheat hail damage easier and more accurate for insurance adjusters and for wheat producers.

6. Yield estimation in large areas: Yield estimation in large areas, such as the prairie provinces depend partly on the manual collection of ground-truth data (data directly observed) regarding crop production. The current practice uses a sampling and survey method that is very expensive and time-consuming. Such surveys are usually late and contain human errors. Farmers use smartphones, cameras, or drones to take photos of wheat heads instead of manually counting the wheat head number to collect ground-truth data. Data from users in a broad region can be anonymized and aggregated to form accurate yield predictions for large areas. For example, our solution can incorporate various data sources to create high-resolution images of wheat conditions in large areas such as the province of Saskatchewan, with weekly updates until harvest. The current prairie provinces do not have such wheat maps.

7. Breeding: Traditional breeding still relies to a large degree on manual observation such as manually estimating and assessing wheat head population density on many thousands of cultivars. This time-consuming manual task is essential to select important wheat traits linked to yield potential, disease resistance or adaptation to abiotic stress. Our technology would allow breeders and researchers to take photos of wheat heads in the field and upload the photos to our application, where wheat head and health can be identified and quantified automatically. Our solution increases assessment accuracy and dramatically reduces the time and costs associated with manual crop assessment. Our solutions can help breeders and researchers to drastically reduce manual tasks so that they have more resources to select for important wheat traits.