Tag Archives: precision agriculture

Georgia Corn Comeback? Farmers Prepare for 2025 Amid Rising Costs & Drought Challenges

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Tifton, GA |

After seeing a significant drop in acres of corn being planted in Georgia last year, those numbers look to be on the rebound in 2025, especially with the issues other crops around the state are experiencing.

“I think that given some of the constraints with some of the other commodities, that we’re probably going to see an increase in corn acreage this year. I have a prediction but we’ll see if it comes to fruition this year, but I think there’s going to be a significant increase with the crop,” says Nicholas Shay, Extension Grains Agronomist.

Despite seeing prices surge by more than thirty percent over the past six months, growers must still walk a fine line in order to turn a profit, especially with the ever-increasing cost of production.

“To navigate that, we have to try to really manage our input efficiency the best we can, and really go back to the drawing board and count our pennies to make sure that we’re being as efficient as possible with our agronomic management or crop management plan in that, for the season,” says Shay.

Another major issue for growers is the long periods of dry weather throughout the state each and every year. It’s a factor that should always be accounted for when planning crop management.

“I think we can bet that every single year, there has been some sort of level of intermittent drought that has occurred. And so, I think really staying on top of your nutrient management and understanding how a crop responds to drought or to a treatment or a fertilizer application that you’re going to apply in the growing season,” says Shay.

The biggest defense against drought conditions is to implement preventative strategies as soon as possible.

“We have to prepare that crop for those stressful environments instead of reacting to a common symptom entomology we may see in the field. If we’d be proactive and have a proactive mitigation strategy, then maybe we can alleviate some of that stress in the growing season, especially when it comes to drought,” says Shay.

With that in mind, it’s never too early to start preparing, especially with planting season right around the corner.

“Growers should obviously be focusing on making sure their equipment is ready, land preparation this time of year, making sure that they have a good plan in place to start the year as far as fertility, as far as weed management, preparing that ground. Then making sure that they have that plan A, plan B in place to be proactive in their approach to mitigate those midseason or early season stresses that we can almost expect are going to occur,” says Shay.

By: Damon Jones

Precision Agriculture Conference Aims to Advance Agriculture Industry

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Athens, GA

With the rise of input costs, challenges with labor, and many other issues that arise, farmers and producers are looking for ways to be as efficient as possible on the farm. To help with that, the University of Georgia created the Institute for Integrative Precision Agriculture and recently gathered researchers, industry professionals, and producers together to begin working towards solutions for those issues.

“A year ago, the University of Georgia created the Institute of Integrative Precision Agriculture. We have fifty-six members, and we hope to get them integrated with our farmers and our industry people, to be able to solve the pressing and current problems that we have. So, this is a forum to exchange ideas, to form teams, and start working on these problems,” says George Vellidis, a professor at UGA. 

During the conference, attendees got the chance to hear from several speakers, one of which was Jessica Kirk, who helps run her family’s farm in Tifton. Kirk spoke about the need for innovation and how it could help them on their farm.

“We are a diversified farming operation. We grow about 6500 acres of produce year-round. Everything from watermelons and cantaloups to fifteen different varieties of specialty peppers. We have a greenhouse operation where we grow around 275 to 280 million, transplants that we ship out all over the United States and then we have a pine seedling operation where we go about 90 million pine tree seedlings,” says Jessica Kirk, Vice-President of Food Safety at Lewis Taylor Farms. 

Kirk says one of their biggest challenges on the farm is labor, as most of the work they do has to be done by hand due to technology and machinery not being advanced enough. 

“Everything we do from transplanting that product from our greenhouse into the field to the harvesting process which goes from our field, into our packing facility, all of that is done by hand. It can’t be done with machinery that we currently have, the technology has not made it to where we need it to be um, for produce, because the standards that grocery stores have, um, will not allow for things that are harvested with machinery to come in. It damages the product too much, so in the end, you end up losing product instead of getting into market. 

According to Kirk, the issue that comes with so much manual labor and the reason they’d like to see innovation, is the cost of that labor, as wages have increased drastically; this year by fifteen percent alone. 

“With the cost of workers, the H-2A workers we bring in rising so tremendously over this past year, about fifteen percent, anyway that we can use in the field from planting, putting those transplants in the ground, laying plastic, to um, in our greenhouse operations where we have, um, all of our trays where we have to sanitize them, where we’re using our machinery to make sure everything is planted properly into those trays to put into our greenhouses, all of those are bringing in, you know, more people and it costs more money, so anyway we can lower those costs, by adding innovation, by adding other systems that can do it much more quickly and maybe with less people would be a win-win for us. 

By: John Holcomb