Michigan family farm embracing precision agriculture for past two decades

August 25, 2019 - Cameron Rudolph

Marc Hasenick isn’t interested in labels. He’s not concerned with being called “innovative” or “progressive.” Like all conscientious farmers, he simply wants to run a sustainable, profitable operation.

Hasenick co-manages a 4,800-acre farm of corn, soybeans and wheat with his father and brother. The operation in Springport, Michigan, is undoubtedly ahead of the curve. Each acre is rotated with a cover crop to enrich the soil with nutrients. The land is not tilled, a practice gaining popularity to preserve organic matter, enhance overall soil quality and improve water infiltration. Keeping heavy equipment out of the fields as much as possible also reduces soil compaction.

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Doing the right thing at the right time

Bruno Basso, an MSU Foundation professor and MSU AgBioResearch scientist who studies the sustainability of row crop production systems, is working with the Hasenicks to broaden their access to modeling software and aerial imagery.

“You can’t manage what you don’t know,” he said. “Precision agriculture is about managing the spatial and temporal variability present in a cropping system. In other words, we need to understand how things are different from one area of the field to the next over the course of time. That requires compiling a lot of data and using modeling.”

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Read the entire article at MSU's AgBioResearch.