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: When planning a sale, grain companies contact railways as far ahead as three months to confirm that they will have the 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 (possibly in July) to the harvest 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. However, rapidly estimating a crop yield is a challenge.

2. Harvesting Preparation: Several weeks before harvesting, a wheat grower needs to know the crop yield in a field so that he or she can plan harvest and storage requirements, delivery estimates, and capital management.

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: The Canadian government plans to reduce nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from synthetic fertilizer by 30 per cent in 2030 relative to a 2020 baseline. The amount of nutrients used by a crop vary with the yield. A big crop requires more nutrients than a small crop. The current crop fertilization recommendation of 2.5 to 3 pounds of total N (soil reserves plus fertilizer) per bushel of hard red spring wheat means it would need a total of 250 to 300 pounds of N for 100 bushels of spring wheat. That means a very large financial, agronomic, and environmental risk. A 2022 report commissioned by Fertilizer Canada and the Canola Council of Canada shows increased adoption of 4R (right source, right rate, right time, right place) stewardship practices could result in a 14 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from nitrogen fertilizer — approximately halfway to the Canadian government’s 30 per cent reduction target for 2030. SGA technology can create high-resolution in-field crop yield maps and growth stage maps in real-time to support the 4R practices. It can decrease fertilizer use, increase fertilizer efficacy, and improve crop yield potential.

5. Crop insurance assessments: Crop insurance claims depend on damage estimation and final yield estimates. Current practices rely on costly human site visits and field data collection, or on an index (e.g. rainfall) that may not accurately reflect true damage on an individual farm (i.e. basis risk). In our solution, using farmers’ smartphone photos and drone images, the damage and yield can be accurately estimated, making insurance claims less expensive. Documentation with supporting images can also be produced for historical reference.

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.