SSMG-45 (J. Kleinjan, D.E. Clay, C.G. Carlson, and S.A. Clay)

Developing Productivity Zones from Multiple Years of Yield Monitor Data

Summary:

The ability to instantaneously record yield data at harvest has been widely available to agricultural producers since the mid-1990s. Yield is the ultimate integrator of landscape and climatic variability and therefore should provide useful information for identifying management zones. However, due to year-to-year climatic variation, identifying useful management zones based on a single year’s yield map is difficult. Increasing the number of years used to define zones may be a solution to this problem. A technique to define a type of management zone known as a productivity zone based on multiple years of yield monitor data involves creating common grid-cells across years and then calculating mean yield and standard deviation maps. ‘Mean yield’ maps created from multiple years of data may be used to determine yield goals and fertilizer recommendations, while standard deviation maps may be used to identify areas requiring corrective management. The preferred method for explaining yield variability used a combination of average yields and standard deviation to delineate productivity zones.


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