Tech helps farmers recover from wet spring

Illinois Soybean Association makes presentation at Chicago Ideas Week

Chinmay Soman of EarthSense demonstrates a farm robot at the Illinois Soybean Association presentation Monday, part of Chicago Ideas Week. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

CHICAGO — Relatively recent gains in technology helped farmers recover from the heavy spring rains and flooding that slowed planting this year.

“We’re two weeks behind in harvest,” said Steve Pitstick, a corn and soybean farmer in Maple Park in Kane County west of Chicago. “We were probably six weeks behind in planting.”

Pitstick was actually commenting in Chicago via FaceTime while standing in his fields. He was part of an Illinois Soybean Association presentation on technology in agriculture Monday that was part of the annual Chicago Ideas Week.

“Today, we’re waiting patiently to harvest soybeans,” Pitstick said, adding that they have to wait for the morning dew to burn off the soybeans so that they’re dry when harvested.

Pitstick estimated it would take 10 days to harvest his soybeans, then they’d move on to corn with the intention to finish by Thanksgiving.

According to Pitstick, improvements in John Deere farm equipment, such as a high-speed planter, helped farmers on both ends of the growing season as they staged a comeback from delayed spring planting.

“We can probably harvest as much in a day now as would have taken two weeks 40 years ago,” he said.

Pitstick is part of a multigenerational farm family in the Maple Park area. He farms 2,300 acres, and with other members of his extended family they hold a combined 12,000 acres. That’s typical of the industry these days, he added. The average farm when he was starting out in the 1970s was 400 or 500 acres, but that’s grown to eight to 10 times that, he said, thanks to improvements in farm machinery that have helped make farming more efficient.

Chad Colby, owner of Colby AgTech in Goodfield, began working with drones in 2010 and has seen them adapted to agriculture. He said that, if a farmer owns 80 fields, “How are you really going to look at that field?” Drones, he said, can shoot aerial images to identify problem areas, or photos that can be sent to agronomists to identify problems.

Chad Colby demonstrates a drone that can also fly horizontally like a plane — allowing farmers to monitor more acreage in a shorter span of time. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

They’ve become reasonably priced, he added. A decent drone for farm use might cost $2,500, while a drone that can mimic the flight of a small plane so it can cover mass acreage in a short amount of time might cost just $6,500. Others can be fitted with heat sensors to create images showing where a field or plants are hottest, again to help in detecting problems before they become obvious.

Colby said he stays up to the minute in technology and is on his 14th smartphone — an iPhone 11 fresh on the market. Pitstick, meanwhile, said all farm machinery works with computer pads these days, and that much of the machinery is self-driving, although farmers do sit in the cabs, same as with the driver of a self-driving car.

Chinmay Soman, of EarthSense in Champaign, said he started working to put robots in the field just two years ago, but they’ve made amazing advancements. He demonstrated a small robot that tours fields to determine “how tall the plants are, how bushy they are.” But he added that they harvest “the most useful data,” including studying the soil, again to detect disease early on or plants suffering from “drought stress” or other needs.

According to Soman, EarthSense currently rents most of its farm robots, but is hoping to get the price down to $1,000, which would expand their use even more. As they mine more data, the qualities they can monitor expand as well.

Jayma Appleby, the ISA’s director of industry relations, said Illinois remains a focal point for agriculture nationwide, and it’s the top soybean producer, ahead of Iowa. “Over the last several years, we have been No. 1, and we’re very proud of that,” she said.

Appleby said technology extends into the very seeds as well, as genetically modified seeds have been developed to improve “drought tolerance” and “flood tolerance,” which along with fast-growing seeds were key to sustaining this year’s crops in an unusually wet environment. At the same time, she added, acreage of non-GMO crops have been expanding, thanks to consumer demand.

With global population projected to hit 10 billion by 2050, Appleby said, Illinois farmers have to grow food “not only for our citizens, but for the rest of the world.” She added, “As the world continues to change, as people continue to change, farmers also change.”

In some ways, Pitstick said, they change to stay the same. He said his father taught him, “Always leave the land better than when you get it,” and technology is helping them do that, with research on the benefits of cover crops, as well as crops that return nutrients to the soil. According to Pitstick, the focus on farms is switching to “regeneration” rather than sustainability, in that regeneration attempts to improve the soil while “sustainable” merely means to sustain it as is.

Chicago Ideas Week, an annual festival that began in 2011, continues through the rest of the week, with a schedule including more than 200 events and speakers such as Hillary Clinton, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, actress-author Jessica Lange, rocker-author Liz Phair, and journalist Ronan Farrow. The ISA presentation was one of more than 50 “labs” scheduled this week as part of the fest.