Researchers associated with Iowa State University's Consortium for Cultivating Human and Naturally reGenerative Enterprises are asking Iowa farmers for help in efforts by C-CHANGE to refine and enhance two key precision agriculture tools currently in development.

The first tool is an open-access, precision-ag and decision-support program called Foresite, which will be hosted by the university. Foresite is a computer-based economic and productivity evaluation system for corn and soybean fields that combines public data on soils, weather, topography and production costs to perform in-field evaluations at a 30-meter resolution scale.

The second tool is a patent-pending, proprietary algorithm called RITAS, which stands for Rectangle creation Intersection Tessellation Assignment Smoothing. RITAS is a yield monitor processing algorithm that is designed to remove data artifacts, such as overlapping paths and extreme yield observations, to provide more accurate subfield yield estimates.

"The idea behind RITAS is to provide the Foresite decision-support tool with the best representation of highly localized, subfield yield data possible," says Jarad Niemi, ISU associate professor in statistics and RITAS developer.

"Foresite combines this high-quality private yield data with multiple public data streams to provide growers with subfield insights designed to aid their decision-making to enhance both their return on investment and their impact on the environment," says Andy VanLoocke, ISU associate professor in agronomy.

To further advance the development of Foresite and the RITAS algorithm, VanLoocke, Niemi and the C-CHANGE team are asking Iowa corn and soybean growers to volunteer to share yield monitor data.

"Our goal is to ground-truth the RITAS algorithm and Foresite decision support tool using actual yield data from cooperating growers," VanLoocke says. "We're looking for growers who would be willing to share several years of recent yield monitor data on fields planted in continuous corn or in a corn-soy rotation. Ideally, we would like to collect data from at least 10 different fields, from 10 different growers, which would provide us with 100 site years of data."

C-CHANGE will provide growers who participate in the program with RITAS-processed and Foresite-forecasted subfield yield maps.

Growers who are interested in participating in this effort are asked to contact VanLoocke by email at [email protected] or by phone at 515-294-8398.

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