Gamma Radiation Mapping: A System for Topsoil Mapping and Variable Rate Nutrient Application

There are many steps that a Certified Crop Advisor (CCA) and the farmer need to take to ensure that their precision agriculture equipment is being used efficiently, writes Stephen Redmond at CropLife. When industry, or CCAs, talk of “precision agriculture” they are often selling a service or piece of equipment that can vary seed or nutrients across a field.

The sales pitch could also be for a “platform” that can manage the vast amount of agronomic and machine data that new planters, sprayers, and combines can collect geospatially as they move across a field. It is essential, however, to gather high resolution soil information as a base for all variable rate applications (VRA) of seed, nutrients, and other soil amendments.

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Precision agriculture needs high-resolution maps of physical and chemical soil properties together with yield and crop biomass maps to enable operational decision support in crop management and to conjure VRA maps1.

The measurement of gamma radiation emitted from soils has been studied for many years. In the early 1930s, gamma radiation sensors were being used in mineral exploration for uranium2. Many mature CCAs and older farmers are probably familiar with the “Geiger counters” that were used to measure radiation in the years following World War II. These early sensors were referred to as Geiger-Muller counter-based sensors. The development of scintillator crystals provided a more accurate method of measuring radiation and an algorithm-based process was developed to break the radiation down into a series of constituents, the naturally occurring elements of potassium, thorium, and uranium.

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