Travelling scholars field report
Posted by: Brent Alexander	Date: 16 September 2004

My main interest in France was to catch up with some of the satellite technology being used for nitrogen management. The French seem to be amongst the leaders in this technology, so it was an ideal opportunity to explore it a little further.

We stayed with Arnaud Darrieux in Toulouse. Arnaud is the current French Nuffield and spent the six weeks touring with us Aussie’s earlier in the year. His has a fairly substantial farm in French terms of around 2000ac. He farms this with his father and they also run a large contracting business with nine headers.

You might remember I explained on our previous trip the interesting system the French have of selling their agricultural land. Basically the land is sold through local council and each prospective buyer submits a resumé and the land is sold to the most deserving applicant. Arnaud explained that to lease country, you also have to progress through exactly the same system, so really you have no chance of achieving any scale while this legislation exists.

I took Arnaud along to meet my first contact – Bernard Coquil. Bernard works for EADS in their Astrium group who are responsible for the satellite extension of their business.

The EADS group is a very large company who among other things manufacture the Airbus aircraft and satellites in Toulouse.

Bernard managed to get us a tour through the plant to see the satellites being built. You have to observe from sealed windows as the air inside the plant has to be cleaner than an operating theatre. Security was also very high, with no photography and your passport had to remain at the front desk during the entire visit.

Astrium launch satellites for various companies around the world and realized there was a growing market for this technology in agriculture in the mid 90’s. Initially the technology was used by the EU in crop forecasting, but they have now developed it as an aid to crop agronomy on an individual farm basis.

Since 2002 the area under their system has grown from 4000ha to a current level of 100,000ha and they expect this to double next year.

The package that is offered to farmers includes a number of images throughout the year, depending on the level of information required by the individual. A common program includes an early pass during tillering to count tiller development and estimate nitrogen requirements, a second pass at first node development to estimate tiller survival and early yield prediction and also produce a fungicide map, a third pass to estimate lodging potential and growth regulator requirements and finally a fourth image to give final yield estimates and perhaps nitrogen top ups for protein.

The Australian version would need to be much simpler with the mid tillering image for nitrogen requirements being the most useful.

Our current nitrogen program at home revolves around counting tillers and supplying enough nitrogen to correct any deficiencies. The ability to do this quickly and cheaply via satellite rather than walking through crops and making a very subjective analysis is very appealing. Even if you do not have the ability to vary rate apply your nitrogen, the fact that you have a complete analysis of the entire paddock must make nitrogen decisions a much easier and more exact process.

I had the chance to meet up with a competitor of the Astrium group in Paris. The guys name was Damien Lepoutre and he owned a company called Farmstat.

The basic difference between the two systems was the way in which the information was taken from the satellite form and turned into something the farmer could use (ie nitrogen application map or yield estimate map).

With Astrium the image was taken and processed through software developed by Arvalis (agronomic advisory company) and then returned to the farmer as a yield estimate or a nitrogen application map. There are a couple of problems associated with this system. First and foremost was the fact that the farmer didn’t have a chance to ground truth the image and override some of the recommendations, for example if you were vary rate applying nitrogen and one end of the paddock presented a poor image due to germination problems, it would receive more nitrogen than the other end that germinated well, simply because it appeared less dense on the satellite image.

The second problem with the system was that this information has to pass through a number of hands before it reaches the farmer and this of course costs.

In contrast the Farmstat system involved the farmer initially buying software to process the images into the information he required. You simply paid an annual subscription to have use of the satellite imagery and downloaded as it was required. It gave you the ability to override any problems you could see on individual maps and cut back nitrogen applications against tree lines in waterlogged areas etc, etc.

While I was in Paris I also had the chance to call in on the International Fertilizer Association (IFA). They are an association made up of members who are predominantly fertilizer manufacturers and distributors. They have a wealth of information on all facets of fertilizer manufacturing and nutrient management.

Some of the more interesting information they had was involving the affect of increased fertilizer control in some of the European countries. Denmark for instance has dropped its manufactured nitrogen usage by 50% since the 1980’s. This has had some positives in reduced nutrient pollution of waterways and also there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that farmers may even be more profitable using fertilizers at a reduced rate, but there has been a drawback in the from of lower protein levels, as farmers have seen these drop from 12% to 9% during the corresponding time frame.

Fertilizer usage in Europe has actually been dropping for the last 10 years and Patrick Heffer from IFA said he expects it drop even further as the new CAP reform heads towards an environmental subsidy rather than the former production based subsidies.

Fertilizer usage has also dropped in the former soviet states as the financial woes of the farmers in that region have had a very big affect on sales.

One of the only bright spots for fertilizer manufacturers is China where their usage has been growing consistently at 2-3% / year and they are now greater than 20% of the world fertilizer market.

IFA run an international conference each year and they gave me the proceedings of their last conference in India that was based on micronutrients. There was an interesting article from an Australian by the name of Richard Bell, who has been working out of the Murdoch University in Western Australia.

He explained that traditional micronutrient research was done through extensive soil testing to determine deficiencies and then a series of follow up experiments to determine optimal nutrient rates; this was done on a regional or state basis to produce large maps covering the entire cropping zone.

This was not only very time consuming, but also costly and because crop types are changing regularly and yields constantly improving, the likelihood of micronutrient deficiency showing up was going to be an ever changing target.

The work he had done was based on what they called “weight of evidence” modeling. His focus was in boron deficiency in canola production and through a series of pot trials soil analysis and field trials he and his team came up with a weight of evidence that pointed to a typical soil type that would be potentially vulnerable to boron deficiencies in canola production.

This meant that farmers who had that soil type could avoid some of the potential problems associated with nutrient deficiency and correct or at least test ahead of cropping that particular crop type.

Simone and I returned to England after Paris and followed up on some of the satellite work that Damien Leputre had done with Farmstat in the UK. The software part of the UK project was done in conjunction with HGCA (Home Grown Cereals Association) to put a local perspective on some of the growth patterns.