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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Columbia, Missouri » Cropping Systems and Water Quality Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #72800
Title: PREDICTING CROP PRODUCTIVITY USING ELECTROMAGNETIC INDUCTION

Author
item KITCHEN, NEWELL - UNIV OF MO
item Sudduth, Kenneth - Ken

Submitted to: Information Agriculture Conference
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/1/1996
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: An inexpensive and accurate method for measuring water-related, within-field soil productivity variation would greatly enhance site-specific crop management strategies. This paper reports on investigations to use an electromagnetic induction (EM) sensor to map claypan and alluvial soil conductivity variations and to evaluate the relationship of EM measurements to grain crop production. Grain yield measurement was obtained by yield monitoring. While yield by EM model r**2 values were fairly low, EM sensing helped explain some crop productivity variability for most crop years on both soil types. A theoretical relationship between EM and production was proposed. With several crop-years of data, the theoretical relationship was supported. This tool for measuring field variability of soils will be most useful for predicting productivity variability where the range in EM variability is large (> 30 mS/m).