In agriculture these days, news about software updates can almost be as exciting as the release of a new hybrid. For customers of The Climate Corporation, new scripting tools are available that can save time and help identify crop protection choices more easily. The updates come just as farmers plan for 2022.

The FieldView program offers scripting capabilities that allow a farmer to build prescriptions for crop protection and nutrient management. The latest scripting enhancements bring automatic zone creation and tankmix product selection.

“We introduced scripting to FieldView about five years ago,” says Matt Lau, global product manager of scripting for Climate Corp. “We’ve had a great opportunity to learn from our customers what they want in a scripting product.”

What the company learned is that farmers need to ease the pain of building prescriptions for their farms. The first new tool is Automatic Zone Creation and can use the satellite image of the field to generate zones.

“So anywhere from two to 12 zones on [farmers’] fields can be generated depending on what their preference is and what their equipment capabilities are, and automatically taking that data that is in their account and letting them leverage the information to build zones to optimize any activity they’re trying to deal with,” Lau says.

Developing precision application zones can be a hassle, but with this system, the scripting tool simply “views” the data and creates precision management zones. The farmer can change the number of zones, too, depending on how specific you want to get when entering the field in 2022.

How zone creation works

Lau says FieldView provides customers with every single scouting image they have on each of their fields over the last four or five years or more, depending on how long they’ve been a customer. Once selected, the system creates the zone and provides a preview of what that looks like in the field. The system will default to five zones, but the user can change the zone count in their prescription.

“So if they only want two zones or two different rates, the prescription would give them the ability to change the count to two and redraw the zones,” Lau says. “From there, they can go in and visualize the zones, and if they want to make some final edits or tweaks, they can do that using any of their background images or background layers they’ve collected over the years.”

Once zones are built, the farmer builds a prescription and exports it to equipment for application.

The tool also makes it easy to run what-if scenarios for fertility plans, allowing you to fine-tune how precise you want to get and what that might mean for your fertilizer bill in 2022.

Building a tankmix

Getting the right crop protection mix in 2022 is going to be important, too, and FieldView is adding a new scripting tool to help there.

“In the summer of 2020, we launched the crop protection scripting functionality, but at the time, it only allowed users to select one product and assign it to their prescription,” Lau explains.

Growers using the tool wanted to be able to assign all their different products going into that application when using the tool. With the new tool, there’s more flexibility.

“For growers making a herbicide application — and they have two or three or four products — they want to be able to tag all those products into their prescription. And this allows them to more accurately assign the data to that prescription for what they’re actually going to do in the field,” Lau says.

The system will allow a user to record up to eight crop protection products into a tankmix when generating a script.

“Oftentimes, you’re trying to optimize passes across the field, and by tank-mixing those products, it allows growers to reduce passes,” Lau says.

With input costs up, advanced scripting tools that help match zones to precision nutrient management and tankmix tools to generate the right batch for each application bring added precision and support for growers in 2022. Learn more at climate.com.