Useful modern technology for farmers

I am on a night schedule again and an unable to take very many photos at night worth posting.  However, to satisfy the ongoing demand for MORE PHOTOS, here is a photo of an old bison bull I took in South Dakota:

Right now there isn't much to report.  Progress on fencing has been miserable the last two times I've been at the ranch.  The first time I was out there the ground was too frozen to auger any holes and now the ground is too wet.  Basically, after a couple seconds of augering, the soil turns into something the consistency of cow diarrhea and the hole fills with water.  Under these conditions it would be impossible to tamp the soil in place after the post was dropped in the hole.  This has meant that the majority of my time has been spent brush cutting to clear the way for later fencing.

While I'm taking a break from brush cutting, I'll take a moment to recommend a useful and free technology that the modern farmer might find useful.  Specifically, I am referring to NASA's Landsat program. 

A Landsat7 thermal image of central Wisconsin. Landsat can give you very precise surface temperature.  The object in the lower-right portion of this graphic is part of Lake Winnebago.  On the top-right section of the graphic you will see the clearly defined boundaries of the Menominee Indian Reservation, which is much cooler due to greater tree cover.

For decades now NASA has launched a series of satellites designed to image large swaths of the earth over and over again.  The images are taken for both visible light (i.e. red, green, and blue) and other non-visible wavelengths (near-infrared and others depending on the satellite).  The images are also 100% free to anyone in the US (it may be available to people in other countries too) and can be downloaded from a US Geological Survey website.  I'm not sure exactly how frequently the same location is being imaged, but I would feel safe saying that the average farm in the US is being imaged several times each month (when you subtract cloud-covered images). 

For farmers Landsat can serve a variety of uses purposing ranging from surface temperature measurement in the spring to drought and plant stress estimates in the summer and fall.  The following are a few examples of the kind of information you can derive from Landsat.

Here is a small section of one Landsat image take back in 1999 showing a portion of the Chesapeake Bay.  In this case we are looking at the normal visible color values with a basic contrast and brightness enhancement. 

This is a zoomed-in section of the above image showing a patchwork forests and fields.  Landsat7's resolution is such that each pixel in the image covers 30 meters of land.  That means that the color or spectral value of each pixel will represent the average reading for that entire 30 meter area. 

Here is the same image of the bay with the near-infrared band added.  In this image anything that appears red is actually infra-red, any red is now green, and any green is now blue.  Actual blue has been removed from the image. 

A closeup view of part of the previous image. In this type of image the darker the red the more stressed the plants are.

Only the NIR band viewed across red, green, and blue.  I didn't check to see what each color represents.  Rather, I just wanted to demonstrate to amount of information one can derive from just one color band.

This graphic was made using the lower end of short-wave infrared (SWIR) for red, the NIR for green, and red for blue. Here bright green is healthy vegetation and soil is purple.

Obviously a farmer doesn't need a satellite to tell him or her where the soil is or whether a crop needs irrigation.  These were just examples intended to demonstrate some of the basic features of Landsat data.  Numerous scientific studies can be found online explaining methods for using Landsat data to assess differences in soil quality within a field, explain why certain sections of a field may yield more than other sections, and, in some cases, may be used to predict yields.