Farming for the future
How science, data, and location intelligence support sustainable U.S. agriculture
Meet the Prevo brothers, fifth-generation farmers managing their family's century farm in Iowa.
These soybean farmers are bucking the trend in conventional farming to invest in soil health—and they’re seeing record yields doing it.
Brothers Kevin, Jason, and Kyle Prevo, own and operate their family's century farm with their wives and families. A century farm is an operation which has been owned by the same family for at least 100 years. Photo: Jason Johnson, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
U.S. Agricultural Market
Nine crops make up the majority of the U.S. agricultural market: corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, sorghum, oats, rice, sunflower, and barley.
Explore the map to see where these crops were grown in 2018. Map data: National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2018
Where are Soybeans grown?
Soybeans and corn are primarily grown in the midwestern United States. The Iowa heartland—with its rich, fertile soils—has found its greatest success in corn and soybean production for over a decade.
What's the greatest challenge facing farmers in the Midwest?
Many would say the erratic weather. In 2019, farmers in the Corn Belt experienced some of the rainiest springs on record, leaving many fields unplanted because of flooding and excess moisture. According to the USDA, farmers affected by flooding planted only 71 percent of their planned soybean crop in May. And by mid-June, Iowa temperatures generally become too high for successful planting. Nationwide, nearly 20 million acres were prevented from planting.
The image on the right shows a region of Illinois and Iowa just downstream from the Quad Cities. The light blue areas show the normal course of the Mississippi, Cedar, and Iowa Rivers. In yellow and green we see croplands planted in corn and soybeans during 2018. Dark blue areas show normally dry lands which were inundated by widespread flooding during late spring 2019.
Planning for an uncertain future
Despite the challenges, the Prevo brothers are managing their land and business to support their next generation of farmers, and many generations to come.
If you drive past Prevo Farm in late summer, rather than an empty, harvested field, you'll see a mixture of plants including sorghum, millet, turnips, radishes, buckwheat, sunflowers, and sun hemp.
That's because the Prevo family in 2011 changed their crop management system from conventional tillage to no-till farming with cover crops. With the next generation of farmers in mind, the family aimed to reduce runoff and improve water infiltration in their fields.
NRCS Soil Scientist Jason Steele evaluates soil structure at the Prevo farm. Photo: Jason Johnson, NRCS
Although they expected an initial decrease in crop yields, Kevin Prevo says it was just the opposite.
“I always heard at least five years yield drag on no-till, but we never saw that. We actually had our best ever average yields in 2014, until we topped it in 2016 for both corn and soybeans.”
The Prevo family also runs livestock on their farm and now lets the cattle graze the cover crops from late summer into the winter, which reduces feed costs. In fact, soil health management practices offer a wide range of benefits for farmers like the Prevos.
Jason Steele, area soil scientist for NRCS in Iowa, says the Prevo's system is sustainable and allows them to plan for the future.
"The crop management system they have in place will allow them to market good farm grain yields year after year . . . It allows them to better plan and prepare. They don’t have to ride the roller coaster of highs and lows every other year that makes it really hard to market grain and be profitable." – Jason Steele
"Farmers implementing conservation practices that improve soil health aren't just hoping for better crop yields, they're banking on them." – NRCS
That's why NRCS and American Farmland Trust recently teamed up to quantify the economic and environmental benefits of soil health management practices.
Through a USDA Conservation Innovation Grant, the American Farmland Trust estimated the economic benefits of soil health management practices for four farmers, including two soybean farmers in the Midwest. They also utilized two publicly-available USDA tools—the Nutrient Tracking Tool and COMET-Farm Tool —to measure water quality and climate impacts.
These case studies showed the following outcomes for the farmers:
"Quantifying these economic benefits of soil health management systems across the nation’s diverse soils, climates, and production systems has been one of the critical gaps in rapidly increasing their adoption,” says NRCS Soil Health Division Director Bianca Moebius-Clune. "Although many farmers are strong conservationist, a deciding factor is how the cost compares to the return."
The NRCS-American Farmland Trust research reflects a growing trend in agriculture today—using science, data, and geospatial technology to help America's farmers and ranchers make sound business decisions.
The right tools in a new age of agriculture
The recent Esri article How Data-Driven John Deere Wins the Market by Marianna Kantor and Fritz van der Schaaf takes a look at John Deere's business intelligence model.
The article portrays farmers as innovators who use predictive intelligence—whether bird patterns or analytics—to drive work on the ground. John Deere builds upon that data-driven sensibility by creating machines and technologies that utilize soil, water, temperature, and other measurable scientific variables.
“As our CEO recently said, we’re a technology company,” says Angela Bowman, a research scientist for John Deere, in an interview. “That’s it, first and foremost.”
And John Deere delivers the right technology, to the right farmers based on business intelligence and location data through Esri tools. In this way, John Deere, much like the familiar Farmer's Almanac, becomes a reliable source of predictive intelligence for the family farm.
Powering the farm with the Internet of Things
As reported by Federal News Network, the researchers at USDA Agricultural Research Service have traditionally written down data points in field books, also called green books, and then entered them by hand into a central database.
But that's all about to change.
Recently USDA, together with Microsoft, Esri, and other private sector partners, launched a Data Innovations project to capture farm data in real-time through technology.
This vision is taking shape at USDA's 7,000 acre farm in Beltsville, Maryland. Under the public-private pilot program, Farmbeats, partners are implementing an ag-centric technical framework that includes drones, sensors, and farm equipment enabled with the Internet of Things (IoT). Through an automated cloud upload and artificial intelligence, the resulting data will become a shared data visualization for farmers and researchers alike.
Living Atlas
Along with USDA and John Deere, Esri brings The Science of Where to the current challenges facing American soybean farmers. This important union of science and technology is improving yields on farms across the nation while also addressing soil health and vitality.
Find out more by visiting ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World and see firsthand the maps, apps, and map layers that are supporting sustainable American agriculture.
Explore data and resources on agriculture
This story map was created in collaboration with U.S. Department of Agriculture, Esri's StoryMaps team, and Esri's Living Atlas team. We want to thank the Prevo family for contributing to this story.
