Ag Geek Speak
GK Technology Inc Team Members, Jodi Boe and Sarah Lovas talk about precision agriculture, agriculture mapping, agronomy and drainage.
Ag Geek Speak
11. Fields of Questions: A Spring Precision Ag Software Support Recap
Sarah and Jodi reflect on the fast-paced spring planting season of 2025, sharing their experiences supporting customers with ADMS software and troubleshooting common prescription issues while managing rapidly changing field conditions.
Situations and questions they cover:
• When to dissolve prescriptions during the export process to optimize controller compatibility
• Understanding the difference between hard breaks and interpolation in prescription maps
• Why you should never dissolve a fully interpolated map without applying rate increments first
• How controller limitations affect prescription exports and formatting requirements
• The importance of creating test prescriptions before heading to the field
• Setting appropriate minimum and maximum rates for fertilizer applications
• Tips for managing controller-specific requirements like single shapefile exports
• How to maintain prescription integrity while meeting equipment limitations
Join us next time for the second half of our conversation about common spring questions here on Ag Geek Speak.
https://gktechinc.com/
And now it's time for Ag Geek Speak with GK Technology's, Sarah and Jodi, friends and I can't wait to get in the fields again. No, I can't wait to get in the fields again.
Jodi:All right, Sarah. It's been another spring and of course, every spring, folks are putting out fertilizer, they are putting out variable rate seeding rates, and that means that there is a lot of questions for folks like you and I supporting ADMS.
Sarah:It is definitely time to recap the spring questions.
Jodi:Jodi, I think there's a lot of really good lessons from some of these common questions, and I think there are things we were asked multiple times, right? So there's no dumb questions here, it's just going over. Hey, what were some of the common questions and how can we clear those up and learn from what we learned this spring?
Sarah:And of course, there's always some great stories to go along with it. Right, Absolutely, you guys are in for a treat. So I do want to say this is a spring of 2025 and I think we had a pretty good spring. I mean, planting season went relatively well and started out drier, so you know, getting the crop in the ground not so tough. I think the frost was pretty deep in a couple spots, so getting that frost to kind of come out and um and and get it so, uh, the the soil bed wasn't so spongy in some spots was a little bit of an issue. But parts of North Dakota got a rain in there that helped bring the frost out in those areas and it seemed like planting season was pretty fast and furious and just kind of went and got done. What did you see around the state?
Jodi:Jodi, Things went in the field very quickly and I know I've mentioned this before already, but I think about, like on my own farm, my dad had started planting wheat when it was like below 32, which is he's always been known to plant early, but he said this is the first time he's ever done that at the beginning of April, and we finished up planting soybeans last Friday when it was almost 95 degrees. So it's been a quick spring. I mean just thinking about how much the weather has changed, going from very cold to very warm so quickly. I feel that's very similar to how planting season went across the state. It was a little bit more quote unquote, like wet spongy in the eastern part of the state, but when planters got rolling, they got rolling and things happened.
Sarah:They went and it went fast. It was like we're going to start. And, of course, farmers, true to their nature, they just go and they don't, you know, they don't stop until they get it all done. Yeah, so anyway, I think one of the things that's really interesting about a spring like this is there's so much work going on in such a compressed time because it's just go, and I do think we had some areas that started earlier, but you know, here it is the middle of May and a lot of the work is already done.
Sarah:Yeah, there's some things that are still going to get finished up, but by and far and away, you know, we're pretty much there. And so within that timeframe, from an ADMS standpoint, in a, in a software sales support person, it sure feels like the phone just rings off the hook with tons of questions, and sometimes we never know what they're going to be, and so it's always interesting to feel those calls. Sometimes I end up learning just as much as the customer does, and there's some great things. So, Jodi, what's probably the most popular question that we got this spring?
Jodi:Ooh, that's a good question. I honestly think the biggest question I got this spring was when to dissolve prescriptions and when not to dissolve prescriptions. That was probably the biggest one, and I know there's been changes within ADMS since I've started and before then, where we brought in that concept of dissolving ports and not but just to back up a little bit and just talk about what we're, what we're doing when we talk about dissolving an export and these are shape file exports that we are talking about.
Sarah:We're not talking about FODs or XML files. Yeah, talking that we're talking about. We're not talking about FODs or XML files. Yeah, we're talking about shapefile prescription exports.
Jodi:So we've gone in, we've already made the GRD surface that shows what our variable rate fertilizer or variable rate input would be, and so what we're doing is we're now exporting that into, basically translating that into a language that rate controllers can use when we do an export Right, and so in this process, there is an option to dissolve and not to dissolve, and basically what this? Why this is important is because controllers can only handle so many data right, and so when we have higher resolution exports, or more squares or a higher resolution of data, it can be challenging for some controllers to handle that many data points.
Sarah:But I think it's important to remember too that when we are exporting out shapefiles, when you're talking about all these data points, there's a lot of different data that's going into shapefiles. We've got vertices, like you mentioned, we've got polygon counts, we've got the number of rates going out to controllers, and so all of these things, controllers and different, different kinds of controllers can handle different amounts of these kinds of data. Yeah, and so we have to think about that in terms of what the particular controllers that we're dealing with, what is it going to accept? What is it going to read?
Jodi:yep, and, and so that's when we might have to use something like dissolving and export in order to make it so that our exported prescription is readable by the X controller. And for those of you that are familiar with ADMS, think back to the rate controller export table within the ADMS manual. It tells you what you need to know about different controllers and how you need to do things. But the point I want to make here is okay, so when do we actually dissolve and when do we not dissolve what really is dissolving? Okay, so what does it actually mean when we dissolve and export? What it means is that we're going to take any sort of rate that's the same as another rate and combine it together, right?
Jodi:So say, if we have a corn seeding rate export and we go from 25,000 to 32,000 seeds and typically what we'd recommend is that you would do hard breaks or break those up into increments of 1,000, so that when you go to export this prescription, you can choose to dissolve that export and then combine in a single polygon on your export that single rate.
Jodi:So now, instead of having rates that range from 25,000 all the way up to 32,000 so that's 7,000 different rates that are possible you're only going from 25,000, 26,000, etc. Up to 32,000. That means we can reduce the number of polygons that we're exporting out, we're reducing the number of vertices and we're reducing the complexity of that file that we're sending out to the controller. And so what dissolving an export does is just makes these exports, these prescriptions, a little bit more simple for controllers and it makes it easier to handle. And so, sarah, what I want to ask you about that is you know what are the cases when we want to dissolve and when we don't want to dissolve, like how do you think about using that and not using that?
Sarah:Well, and I think I do think you kind of mentioned the concept of hard breaks in there, and I think it's really important to remember that if we're starting with a fully interpolated prescription and that's what we are going to dissolve as the output we actually have to group together those rates. And you mentioned that thousand increment, and so usually we're rounding to a thousand seeds, for example, so that there's going to be a rate change every thousand seeds. Okay, so you're not going to have a rate at like 2,500. You're going to have a rate at 2,000 and you're going to have a rate at 3,000. There's not going to be one in the middle.
Jodi:And Sarah, can I ask you, like, when we interpolate, why do we get values that go in between 25,000 and 26,000? Like, how does interpolation interact with having all those different rates?
Sarah:I think that is a really great question and actually something that's really important. And it also goes to another question that I get all the time in the spring of the year and maybe you get this too is why hard breaks and when. And honestly, going back to this dissolving conversation, because it all kind of circulates around and kind of like topples on top of each other we are making a circle here. There is a point to this conversation. What happens is we want to be able to use hard brakes for things like dissolving. You need to have rates that can and areas of the field that can be grouped together into one thing. That's the whole point of dissolving is that you group together everything with that same number and it becomes a polygon, regardless of the geographic location within the field. So you can have disconnected polygons that are now seen as one polygon because the unifying identifier is that rate, which is really fun. But to get there, backing up to when are we using hard breaks and when are we interpolating and what is interpolating actually accomplishing? Okay, well, let's back up and talk about zones here for a second.
Sarah:When we make a zone map based in productivity across the field, oftentimes we're taking actual images, satellite images and we end up with varying oftentimes NDVI values across the field or values across the field which are depicting that productivity. You could do this with yield maps if you wanted to and you could see how the yield is constantly changing across the field. It's not the same. Basically, what we're doing when we make zones is we are grouping together areas of the field that act similarly to each other. We're using statistics, right? If you've ever even seen, like test plot data from a cornfield, are these numbers significantly different or not? Just because they might be one or two bushels away, that might not be a significant difference, but there is a change in that area, right?
Jodi:What I hear is like, even though you've got five zones in a field right, Not every part of that dark green zone or that dark red zone is going to act the same way. There's still variation within the different zone breaks that you've created.
Sarah:That's exactly what I'm talking about, jodi, is that when we've got that zone, statistically all those values within that one color of zone are statistically the same. That's why it's a zone, but within that you probably still have a little bit of variability. That's why it's a zone, but within that you probably still have a little bit of variability. And so when we have full interpolation on our map we assign a rate into the dark green zone, the light green zone, the yellow zone, the orange and the red, and when we do that it's going to change the rate within that zone a little bit because the values change as they move and interpolate across to the next zone. So now when we're assigning hard breaks, when we take that fully interpolated map that has that constant variation going across the entire field, the entire prescription, we bring that over into the map window. Again for those of you out there that are ADMS users, and even though that fully interpolated map is probably the absolute, most correct agronomically thing that we could do in that field, because it's already describing that infinite variability that we've got out there, we still need to make it work in that controller and there are controllers out there that just absolutely have to have those hard breaks. And so from here, once we could take a look at that picture, we could think about things in terms of are we working with fertilizer? Are we working with seed? What kind of seed are we working with? Are we working with soybean seed, where we're planting hundreds of thousands of seeds per acre? Or are we working with corn seed, where we're planting, you know, 20,000 seeds per acre? And what can we group together for increments that make sense? So, generally speaking, I don't know how you do it, jodi, but I'm kind of checking out 10,000 seeds for soybeans. That's kind of my round to increment that I've been using this year, especially on the air seeders.
Sarah:I've got some guys that are trying to manage iron chlorosis in soybeans and so in those scenarios we're really trying to push that population and those iron chlorotic areas and get those really push the populations. When you concentrate soybean seed together in areas prone to iron chlorosis, it can help extract iron from the soil. So I've got places out there where we are pushing the population up to 190. And even a couple of places where I've got some guys that are still want to do 200,000, which is great for that, but then likewise, they still probably have some issues with white mold and in those scenarios we need to actually drive that population down so we can get airflow through the canopy. But we got to be careful with how low you're going to go. So that's the caveat that I'm putting out there for this podcast you want to make sure that you're not going to limit your yield either. But this year actually drove down some of those populations down to 100,000 seeds. So that's a pretty big difference, right? 100,000 up to 190. And so we were using 10,000 seeds on that. And if you think about what that means, if you use that increment from 100,000 up to 190, that means we really only have, you know, nine, 10 rates out there in the field. That makes it that number of rates is a lot easier to translate over.
Sarah:And I don't know, jodi, what you found. I'd be curious to know what you think about this. But, generally speaking, I like the way my prescription maps look better when I fully interpolate it, when I'm writing the prescription. So I bring it in and I actually have that fully interpolated map the most to me, the best agronomic map that I can possibly make for that scenario. But then I like to round to increment after the fact. I think it keeps the agronomic integrity the best. But that's just what I think when I'm looking at the map Jodi. What's your experiences with it?
Jodi:Yeah, no, I agree, and I think it depends on, like, how you build that map right, because what there be cases where, like you can't necessarily interpolate or say, for instance, like it when you are combining images and combining layers together and that's how you're making your final map works, and I'd say for most everybody out there, that's what you're going to end up with and interpolation works fantastically. Like if you are modifying a map at the end and putting in a lot of different mod zones and kind of messing with the values. That way interpolation looks a little bit different on the back end. So that's my only caveat here. But no, I completely agree.
Jodi:I think the maps look best when you go into merge zone results.
Jodi:You put in the values of what you want your rates to be, interpolate the output and then around to increment once it comes back out the other side.
Jodi:So you've got a field with five zones and you didn't interpolate the output. If you had five rates that you wanted for corn, again using the 25,000 to 32,000 population example, if you didn't interpolate the output, if you only had 25,000 to 32,000, you'd end up with five population values at the end too, without any of those gradations in between those zones that you'd get with interpolating your output. So I think it just in that way you can get more precise by interpolating and then also help to make it easier for planters to adjust the rate. And again, like stuff's always improving, I'm sure things will probably get easier for things to adjust, but having some gradation is very helpful for the mechanical side of getting things to flow and getting things to adjust. But having some gradation is very helpful for the mechanical side of getting things to flow and getting things to be at the right rate that you want them to be at the end. So, yes, I I agree with everything you just said, sarah.
Sarah:Now I do want to make note that there are some places where I am not a big fan of dissolving, and for sure you know, maybe it's too soon to even start that part of that conversation, but I think it's important to note that again.
Sarah:When we're trying to export those data, you know we're trying to deal with translating different kinds of data and certain controllers handle those different kinds of data and certain controllers handle those different kinds of data better or worse.
Sarah:So, for example, the number of vertices, the number of polygons, the number, the size of the file you got to, you got to go in and check and see how big that file size is. And so it's interesting because in the last year, when it comes to dissolving, if I haven't done especially a large enough round to increment on some fertilizer rates, I've been having some issues with some vipers out there actually taking some of those prescriptions because it's too many vertices. So I actually went back to not dissolving those prescriptions and just going back to the good old-fashioned grids with all000 polygons out there for controllers like Vipers, and so we still have to watch that. But I'm finding more success going back to that old-fashioned way of just using that grid polygon, keeping it fully interpolated, you know watching the number of rates from there and where it needs to read if it's the center of the polygon, or you know wherever that needs to go and then exporting that out. And there's some other controllers that are like that too.
Jodi:I think the two things that I keep in mind when I think about dissolving I typically will dissolve when I've rounded to an increment, right, so I've got you know fewer rates and like whether that's 10 to 20, whatever the point is is like I don't want to take a fully interpolated map and then dissolve it when I'm exporting.
Sarah:And the other case is is that one thing that happens when oh, jodi, can I just back up one minute, Because you said something that's really important right there. Never take a fully interpolated map and dissolve it, for the people in the back. Say that one more time, jodi, never dissolve a fully interpolated map and dissolve it For the people in the back. Say that one more time.
Jodi:Jodi, never dissolve a fully interpolated map Again, like we just talked about, what dissolving does is it takes all those rates that are the same and creates a polygon for them. And so if you've got using Sarah's example if you've got 100,000 soybean seeds, up to 200,000 soybean seeds in the same map, you hypothetically have 200,000 discrete rates. That could be going on, and so what dissolving in that case would do would be creating a rate for a polygon of a rate, 100,000 through 200,000. So you can imagine that that would cause some issues. So if you have a fully interpolated map, do not dissolve it.
Jodi:That's really good information, right there you will find out that there are issues, and that's OK. Well, it's not OK.
Sarah:Don't do that, we'll just leave it there, especially if there's rain in the forecast and the floor is sitting right there. That is a bad day. Exactly, exactly the other thing, I think about, and I think it's more.
Jodi:you know, I can think of a specific planter planter monitor that requires the same. So, like when you're dissolving output, it has to be separated into separate shapefiles, right? So like when you click dissolve output, the other checkbox below it will also say create separate shape files. So if you are exporting to a controller that cannot use separate shape files for different rates and again refer back to the ADMS exporting matrix to see what and where Sarah's going to put it up in the video, even though you can't see it.
Sarah:Sarah is flipping to that page. I'm going to find us the page number.
Jodi:But that's another case, like I can think of a specific planter monitor where you need to have all rates in a single state file. That would be a case where you can't, even though you have hard breaks or discrete values, few number of rates where you could dissolve, where you wouldn't be able to dissolve because it wouldn't work in that specific monitor. So those are just the two things that I keep in mind when I think about not to dissolve an output or dissolve a prescription.
Sarah:That's really important information and I think it's OK for us to mention that. If you want to have success getting prescriptions into Borgo, the Topcon controllers, that's one that you have to have all of your prescriptions on the same shape file. And that's important because that's for Borgo carts and you know they've got those carts are huge, they usually have huge tools on them. They've got, you know, lots of different bins so they can variable rate a lot of different products, but each bin in the cart with its own separate prescription. All of that has to be on the same shapefile. So and it gets to be a challenge because a lot of times these Borgo carts are getting used out in fields that are huge. You know they're really popular in Montana, saskatchewan. They came from the big prairies of Canada, it's where they're from. So you know, a couple thousand acres in a field not a big deal for these carts to take on.
Jodi:I'm really glad you mentioned that, Sarah, because that is not the controller I was thinking of. So I learned something today. Oh, what was yours? Because that is not the controller I was thinking of. So I learned something today. Oh, what was yours? So the older generation precision planting monitors, you can't have different rates and like they all have to be in the same file. So, like newer monitors, they're fine. But and maybe it's just separate products, but still the same thing If you're exporting out, they have to be in the same.
Sarah:If you've got separate bins, you could be having seed going down with one, you could be having fertilizer going down with one, but all of that has to be in the same shape file. Yes, yep, and same.
Jodi:Yeah, for precision planting monitors, if you've got two hybrids it has to be in the same shape file. It cannot be separate. But again, this is such a great conversation because some of these monitors, you know, even you know there's different generations of precision planting monitors and they can kind of vary in terms of what they can and cannot read and there's different monitors for different equipment and they all kind of have these little eccentricities. So you know, maybe you don't get it right on the first time when you export and put it into a cart or a monitor, and that's okay, that's going to happen. Like you can't know everything about every single monitor. Like over time you'll build up that experience and know. But this is why it's important to do like a yard test file so that you can figure out Test prescriptions.
Sarah:Yes, I could advocate the test prescription for everybody to use. Holy Hannah, I mean, that would just If everybody would just go out and try a test prescription in the spring of the year.
Jodi:It would be great, yep, because you know it's so funny because, again, it's easy to make a prescription like just a general prescription, right, it's as simple as saying taking your fertilizer map, your Vaborite fertilizer map, and saying export. The hard thing is figuring out. You know what are the details that I've got to put in here to make it so that it's readable by the specific controller that I'm putting in. And, of course, as you get more things going on more bins, more products it gets a little bit more complicated. But again, details. You can either call us at GK that we work with all these things Sometimes we don't always know all the answers but we can help you connect to somebody that does or you know, when you work with these things long enough, you gain that experience.
Sarah:But I do want to back up, though, because we were talking about dissolving and that whole idea that you can't separate out shape files, and I think we were talking about, like Virgo cards and things like that, and so it's still important to remember that, if you're gonna export out the old-fashioned way with the old grid, there are definitely places where that is still extremely acceptable, wonderful and the absolute best way to go. So, even though we've got these fancy ways of dissolving and grouping together rates and and those sorts of things, just remember sometimes the old-fashioned way is the way to go. Yes, you don't always have to dissolve, right, but you do need to make sure that you're keeping it under 10 000 polygons, generally speaking, and for those of you with some of those controllers that need like 1500 polygons, like 1500 um, then you will probably be dissolving and rounding to increment.
Jodi:Just so you can get better detail. Absolutely right, Because when we export a prescription using the grids, we reduce like if we're trying to get under 10,000 polygons what we do is we increase the size of the polygon, right, so decrease the resolution, take out a little bit of detail, but we increase that polygon size until we're under that 1,500 polygon mark. So you can imagine, if you're going from 20,000 down to 1,500, you're going to have to increase that resolution a lot and lose a lot of detail in order to meet that 1,500 limit. And so, yeah, in that case, dissolving to an increment, making those hard breaks and then dissolving the output when you export, it is probably a really good thing just to preserve the integrity of the original prescription.
Sarah:Absolutely, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Another question that I feel like I always get in the spring of the year is about enforcing max and min rates. Yes, I would love for you to talk about this, sarah. Well, it's kind of a big deal right.
Sarah:There's fertilizer applicators out there. This is generally more of a fertilizer spreader issue than anything else, but it's one of those things. You just got to be cognizant of the equipment's ability to apply low rates. For certain controllers, zero rates are really complicated usually a liquid thing going on there but for dry fertilizer spreaders, applying low rates can be really hard and it's better to go to a zero rate or and implement a minimum rate. So there's, if you're ever in the merge zone results file or and you're writing a prescription, there's a box in there that you can check that says enforce max and min rates. And it's the same thing when you're exporting out in the shape grid there's an enforce max and min rates and what it does is when you set up that fertilizer like let's say you've got 4600 set up to be a fertilizer in your fertilizer database in the software there is a place at the bottom where it says max rate and min rate and you can go in it, edit these things and save them and that's in the setup fertilizer section, right?
Jodi:Yes, that is correct.
Sarah:Nice, that's pretty good. There's a lot of buttons in the software. Sometimes remembering where everything is is kind of a challenge to me.
Jodi:But yes, when I'm on the phone with people. I open ADMS so that I tell them exactly the right button.
Sarah:That's what I do too. We want to help you as much as possible.
Jodi:We're trying to do our best so that we're on the same page, okay.
Sarah:I have had a couple of victory calls where I've been like driving someplace and you know a customer calls or whatever, and they're like, hey, I'm trying to, I'm trying to do this, whatever it is, and so I'm trying to remember in my mind where all the buttons are, and I would. I would just like to announce that I've actually had a couple of victories with that now where, like I, I remembered the buttons and the guys like, hey, that totally worked, it was great. Anyway, I digress.
Jodi:I dissolve, just kidding, anyway, sorry. Okay, so we have the minimum and maximum rate set up and set up fertilizers.
Sarah:It's in the fertilizer. So if you set like the minimum rate on that urea, that 4600 fertilizer, to like 50 or 60 pounds, it's going to stop at that number, so at 50 pounds. If there's any rates in your prescription between zero and 50 pounds, what it's going to do is if it's 25 pounds or above, it's going to push that rate up to 50 pounds. If it's below that 25 pounds, it's going to turn it into a zero rate so that fertilizer spreader does not have to figure out how to spread 20 pounds because that's such a low rate that you're not going to get an accurate application at that low volume. Now I actually have some fertilizer suppliers that I work with that have their minimum rate set at 80 pounds. So you know it's important to make sure that we've got enough volume going through the spreader to make sure we can control those rates well.
Jodi:Absolutely. One thing too, like on the other side as well a maximum rate, right, the spedders that we work with, they can't, all I know. Sometimes, when I put you know guidelines together or like a fertilizer program together, sometimes it's just like, hey, I need 800 pounds or 850 or 900, 950 pounds of the blend here, but not all speders can handle putting down 950 pounds of fertilizer. So, a I need to either figure out how to change my blend to meet my N rates, because that's what I'm typically blending for if I've got a lot going on but A, backing up a little bit, I need to figure out, a for the spreader that this fertilizer rack is going to, what is their maximum rate? They are not all the same, they're probably pretty similar.
Jodi:But like just check, I know, like when I set up for just thinking about fertilizer, for, like my own farm, right, I can only put so much through the cart that the fan can handle in terms of both seed and fertilizer. So I need to be cognizant of that. Same thing for spreaders. Typically, if it's over 900 pounds, that's a problem. So keep that in mind. Either account for that when you're putting together your fertilizer programs or make sure that you've got that maximum rate of what that spreader you're writing to can handle in your setup fertilizer side.
Sarah:And if you're applying like more than 900 pounds, you're probably spreading lime.
Jodi:Or blending in one bin a lot of stuff. Yeah, no, absolutely. This is a really good place to stop the first half of our conversation about common spring questions. We've gotten here at GK Technology. I've learned so much just in this 30 minutes and I think you guys will too, so please join us next time for the second half of our conversation here on Ag Geek Speak.