The work Salin 247 is doing fits right in with the BioCentury Research Farm’s emphasis on innovative and sustainable research and the development of cutting-edge technologies.
“The BioCentury Research Farm has been a hub for public-private partnerships for over 15 years,” said Matt Darr, director of the BioCentury Research Farm and Digital Ag Innovation Lab. “We are thrilled to welcome Salin 247 into our community and know their work perfectly aligns with our spirit of discovery and innovation.”
A compact option for farm equipment
The machines are compact compared to traditional farm equipment, especially given that a tractor is not needed for them to operate. Field tests have been conducted on 50 fields in seven states during the past three growing seasons, which have helped the Salin 247 team make refinements.
“It’s amazing how different and unique each field is,” Krog said. “We have to calibrate and fine-tune the equipment for each field.”
That includes mapping out fields ahead of time and noting any drainage intakes, terraces or other obstacles the equipment may encounter. The information is uploaded to the machine’s GPS before it is put in the field to begin work.
The next step, Krog said, will be installing cameras on the equipment that are connected remotely to a tablet, allowing farmers to see if parts of the machine have become dirty and need to be cleaned before resuming field work. Artificial intelligence could also monitor the camera feed and identify problems.
Krog said more testing and fine-tuning must be done before the autonomous equipment becomes available for purchase. They will use their new space at the BioCentury Research Farm to design and build docking stations for the equipment to be refilled with seed or spray, eliminating the need for a farmer to refill the machines.
Collaborating with Iowa State faculty, students
The machines have already been tested via research projects conducted by Iowa State faculty and graduate students. Some of those have included:
- a project with Mike Castellano, professor of agronomy, and one of his graduate students. Castellano was studying early planted soybeans, and the graduate student was researching the application of variable rates of nitrogen on fields.
- the use of the autonomous plot sprayer by Daren Mueller, professor, and Stith Wiggs, agricultural specialist, in the Department of Plant Pathology, Entomology and Microbiology, on one of their projects.
- a weed mapping project conducted by Asheesh “Danny” Singh and Arti Singh in the Department of Agronomy. After a drone maps out the location of weeds in a field, Salin 247’s autonomous equipment is deployed to “see and spray,” essentially doing a spot spray that targets weeds identified via the drone rather than spraying the entire field.
- several projects led by Nadilia Gomez, chief technology officer for the Digital and Precision Agriculture research and innovation platform.
Krog said through all these collaborations and the past three years of testing, he and his team have learned a lot, and there’s a lot more to learn. He is excited about the machines’ potential and the future of Salin 247.
“There are a lot of unique things you can do with this smaller equipment than what you can do with standard larger farm equipment,” Krog said.
Source : iastate.edu