It didn’t take long for agronomists and farmers to discover that flying a drone with a camera attached to it over crop fields could yield useful information. In the early days, turning those pictures into an image that a computer could use for in-depth crop analysis took time and effort. Imagery transfer to computers has improved in quality and become more efficient over time.

Sentera, St. Paul, Minn., is taking data analysis from aerial images to the next level and bringing the industry along with it. The company recently launched what it calls the direct georeferencing, or DGR, system. It quickly connects to an ag drone to provide high-precision location certainty to high-resolution imagery.

Ryan Nelson, chief mechanical engineer for Sentera, explains: “With the DGR, we’re taking it one step further by eliminating inefficiencies so our customers can deliver insights faster.” These insights include meaningful observations about how crops are performing at any given time, and what you might be able to do to help them perform better.

Simply put, DGR means fewer camera images are required, and orthomosaic stitching of images isn’t needed. Drone flight time could go down 60%, and time from picture capture to analysis reduced eightfold. That could be a game-changer for serious crop scouts. Learn more at sentera.com.

Saving 10 million pounds of nitrogen

Produce the same corn yields, but cut nitrogen use by 10 million pounds. Sound impossible? David Hula doesn’t think so. Hula of Delaware and Randy Dowdy of Georgia are world record-setters for top corn yields. They formed Total Acre, a group open to progressive growers willing to invest in learning how to grow corn better.

Recently, Total Acre and Sound Agriculture, makers of Source Corn, formed a strategic partnership that they say could remove 10 million pounds of nitrogen in the first season and 63,000 metric tons of caron dioxide over the next three years. That would be equivalent to removing 4,500 cars from U.S. roads each year.

The “secret sauce” is replacing synthetic fertilizers. Spokespersons for both groups say that by using Source Corn, growers who participate can decrease nitrogen fertilizer use without decreasing yield. See totalacre.com and sound.ag.

Farming’s new ‘clouds’

Your dad and grandad made lots of decisions on the farm by watching clouds in the sky. Maybe you still do, but odds are you also know about clouds they could not imagine — digital clouds where data is stored until needed. If you’re trying to explain the idea to an older generation, tell them the digital internet cloud is like their attic of the old days, more or less. You store stuff there until it’s needed.

Fusionware offers an end-to-end cloud-based supply chain platform for farmers. And if you’re in a specialized business such as growing potatoes or raising and processing seed corn, Fusionware can automatically track interactions and solutions between buyers and sellers. There is no need for duplicate input into multiple systems.

Recently, Fusionware and John Deere announced integration with the John Deere Operations Center, the precision ag and data management solution used with Deere machines. The new integration allows Fusionware customers to sync data on-farm seamlessly.

The John Deere Operations Center is also integrated with dozens of other computer software platforms, through similar agreements between Deere and software companies. Visit fusionware.com or johndeere.com.