Recorded at Farm Forum Event 2019, this session features Wes Anderson of Crop Pro Consulting explaining SWAT maps, a precision agriculture method built on stable soil properties like topography, texture, and salinity rather than temporary yield variation. He walks through real field examples where mapping fertilizer responsiveness, not just yield potential, changed how growers allocated phosphorus, copper, and nitrogen across a field, and makes the case that water availability, more than any single nutrient, drives most in-field variability.
Wes Anderson of Crop Pro Consulting spends this Farm Forum session making one argument: yield maps and NDVI imagery show you where a field performed, not why, and building fertilizer plans off yield alone gets the response backwards more often than growers expect.
His alternative is SWAT maps, a patented method that layers topography, electrical conductivity, and elevation data to delineate management zones based on stable soil properties, the ones that don't shift year to year the way yield does. From there, the real work starts: matching fertilizer response, not yield potential, to each zone.
What's Inside
- Why yield maps and NDVI change every year, and why fertilizer decisions built on stable soil properties hold up better over time
- The difference between low yield potential and low fertilizer response, and why they're not the same thing
- A real field example where correcting a single sandy ridge for copper deficiency changed the outcome
- Why eroded knolls are often starved for phosphorus while depressions are already overloaded, and what that means for reallocating inputs
- What it actually costs to map a field with a SWAT box, and why the map holds up for years once it's built
- The line Wes borrows from a colleague that sums up the whole philosophy: good agronomy applied precisely, not poor agronomy applied precisely
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